by Rob J. Hayes
"I am the weapon," the words hissed from my mouth. I reached for the shard of mirror hidden in my bandages, tore it free, and stabbed it into Prig's fat fucking neck.
Prig screamed and I saw blood wash over my hand. All around me Deko's people were moving, some protecting him while others moved towards me. A whirlwind of chaos and violence all moving in slow motion with me at its centre. I saw Prig's fist coming, but I didn't have time to dodge it. He punched me in the face and the world went black.
Chapter 10
Induction into the Orran Academy of Magic was the worst time of my life. It only lasted a month, but that month was worse than all my time in the Pit. Worse than my stay in the Red Cells underneath Terrelan's capital city of Juntorrow. Worse than the birth of my second child, Sirileth, the Monster.
Josef and I were inseparable. The tutors at the academy tried, of course, but I have long since discovered it is quite difficult to control a pair of wilful children. Each night they separated us into our dorms and each night one of us would slip out and find the other. Come the morning, they would find us huddled together in one of the bunk beds. This was before they decided to embrace and nurture the relationship. We were always stronger together than apart.
The first few days of induction were not too harrowing. We were introduced to the others who would be in our classes: Lesray Alderson, who I later gave the incredibly clever nickname of bitch-whore, Tammy Oppen, and Barrow Laney. It was not a large induction by any means, and of the five of us, only myself, Josef, and Lesray were deemed to be powerful enough to be suited to war. We were shown around the academy, both the places we were allowed to go and those that were off limits to students. I remember taking note of every door we were told never to open, and I opened almost all of them, and a few they thought well-hidden even from curious children.
We were fed, three meals a day and good food. It was the best I had ever eaten in my young life, and probably better than I eventually ate as a queen. They tested us with our numbers and letters. At the time, I could do simple mathematics, but my parents hadn't thought to teach me what little they knew of letters, there simply wasn't a need for it in our little forest village. Only the elders and merchants had need of reading, and the young daughter of a basket weaver was never intended to be either of those. Josef had a better grasp of both reading and writing, but he was also two years my senior. Still, I remember being a little jealous of him for his ability to make sense out of pages and ink.
I believe it was our third day into induction, just our fourth day at the academy, when the tutors began testing us. Sources are dangerous things to anyone not attuned to the magic they contain. Even after half a lifetime of research I still do not know what affects specific attunements. Even the diviners, those whose sole task it is to find potential Sourcerers, do not know the secrets. I'm certain neither of my parents were attuned to even a single Source and yet there I was, able to wield five at once. Perhaps the Rand know, or even the Djinn, but it's fair to say neither of them will be sharing any more of their secrets with me. I don't just burn bridges, I scorch their foundations and set the water on fire as well.
For young students at the academy the only way to test attunement was with time, pain, and lots of Spiceweed. Trial and error, they called it. I call it fucking torture, and I've experienced enough of it to be a bloody expert on the subject. I suppose I should be thankful they used small Sources, those no larger than a marble, to test us.
The pain brought on by ingesting a Source you're not attuned with is... Well, it's bloody horrible. Within the first minute, the cramps start. They begin in the stomach, but spread outward, muscles tensing, tendons contracting. They get more severe as it goes on as well. So painful... Nothing else I have ever experienced has come close and I have suffered a great many types of torture. After a couple of minutes vision starts to dim and something tears inside. I am no student of physiology, the Biomancy arts are as foreign to me as the more mundane surgeries, but I believe it is considered a bad thing when people start bleeding from their eyes, ears, and nose.
If the incompatible Source is not regurgitated within a few minutes the Sourcerer will die painfully, and messily. Despite the rather terminal outcome of using an incompatible Source, it remains the only way to test a Sourcerer for their attunement.
One by one, Josef and I were made to ingest a Source and we were monitored for the reaction. As soon as we started to cramp, Spiceweed was administered. The weed might have saved my life time and time again, but it is not without its drawbacks. It feels like vomiting up everything you've eaten in the past week, and the retching doesn't stop just because you're empty. Some people have it worse than others, and I have always been one of the former, though I wish it were otherwise.
Pyromancy was the third Source the tutors at the Orran Academy of Magic tested me with. I had already failed my first two attunements, both Geomancy and Meteomancy, and I remember the trepidation I felt on that third day. People can be trained just like any animal and I had already come to expect the discomfort from swallowing down a Source, the feeling of something hard sticking in my throat on the way down. Then the agony would start, the cramps moving from the gut out toward my limbs, my muscles screaming in pain. It never got any further than that, the moment I showed signs of rejection Tutor Luen would rush forwards with Spiceweed and shove into my mouth. After just two failed attunements I had already come to expect failure, and the consequences scared me shitless.
The tutors never told us what attunement or rejection really meant back then. They never told us it was out of our hands. I had failed twice and I thought it was my fault. I thought I had done something wrong or not tried hard enough. I was terrified of what would happen if I showed no attunements. Just six years old, torn away from my family and forced to swallow shards of magic that hurt on the way down almost as much as on the way back up. Worst was the thought that they might kick me out if I failed too many times; the uncertainty of what I would do, how I would survive on my own was terrifying. Josef stood by me as much as he could, even so early on in our friendship, but he was also going through attunement. Though it didn't affect him as badly as it did me, he was also suffering.
I remember the feeling after swallowing the Pyromancy Source. I winced, expecting the worst. Tutor Luen moved towards me, a small clump of dried Spiceweed in hand. A Sourcerer can use any Source, any magic, but if they lack attunement it will hurt them, kill them much faster. With the Geomancy Source I felt connected to the ground beneath my feet. I could feel the composition of the earth. I didn't even understand it, but I could feel the lines of power in the earth. Right up until the rejection started and then all I could feel was agony. With the Meteomancy Source I could tell rain was coming even though it was hours away. The Pyromancy Source was different. It felt like a fire had been lit inside my body, but it didn't burn me. It warmed me through. I could have stripped naked and bathed in ice water and not felt the cold. I've done just that since, and I can tell you it's quite refreshing. There are tribes of terrans in the far north who insist it is excellent for the skin and for good health, though few of them can use Pyromancy to keep them warm through the soaking.
I was ecstatic. Not just because of the fire I felt inside and the certain knowledge that I could use it to set the world ablaze, but also because it meant I could stay. Stay at the academy, stay with Josef. Relief was what made me truly happy that day, relief from the fear that had been gnawing inside of me since that first rejection. True, it was only three days, but to a child, three days is a lifetime and also passes in the blink of an eye. I admit I was less happy when Tutor Luen advanced upon me with Spiceweed once again. They had discovered my first attunement, but that didn't mean I was ready to wander around with fire at my beck and call. I can't blame them for that; untrained Sourcerers discovering magic for the first time are dangerous on an entirely different level. And only a fool gives an unsupervised six-year-old a match.
The strange thing is, not all Pyromance
rs feel the flame inside. It is the magic of temperature rather than fire. When Lesray Alderson was tested for it, the bitch-whore said she felt a ball of ice inside, not burning but freezing instead. Maybe that is why we were always at odds with each other, even from the start. A natural war between fire and ice. Then again, I think it far more likely it's because she's a rampant cunt.
There were, at the time, twenty-two known Sources. I had attunement to only six of them, but I was tested for all of them. I retched so hard I was vomiting blood. After the third day, the tutors stopped sending me back to the dorms and gave me my own bed in the infirmary. I remember looking in a mirror and seeing red dots all around my eyes. The physicians told me I had burst blood vessels, such was the violence of my reaction to Spiceweed. Despite it all, the testing continued. I was just six years old, torn away from my family. It felt like torture. It was torture! I cried myself to sleep every night, and every morning I woke to find Josef next to me in my infirmary bed.
Chapter 11
I awoke to pain. The coughing fit that racked my body only heightened that agony. I ached everywhere and could barely summon the energy to open my eyes. Instead, I chose to listen. And I heard nothing.
Silence down in the Pit was beyond rare. There was always noise, usually from the digging. I felt my nerves fraying, warring with the pain inside until staying still became a torture all its own. A little part of me dared to hope I was free. That somehow, I had been rescued from the hell of that place. But I felt cold rock beneath me and already I knew the false hope for what it was.
With a groan I started to shift, getting my hands underneath me. I dragged my eyelids open to see grey stone and a puddle of spittle and blood. As I rolled onto my back, I saw a single table bolted to the stone beneath it, and two chairs. I was in the overseer's interrogation room.
My head pounded like the end of a week-long drunk, an unpleasant feeling I have since come to know more than once, and my face felt stiff and swollen. I remembered Prig hitting me, the shard of mirror still embedded in his neck. I tried to smile at that, but my cheek flared with agony like fire running through my flesh. The wound still hadn't been dealt with. Raw flesh still oozing blood.
I struggled to sitting, clutching at my ribs. I'm convinced Prig or the others must have kicked me after I collapsed. It was my first time experiencing the delightful agony of a broken rib, and I was quickly learning just how debilitating it was. It took a lot of effort, and more than a few cries of pain, before I pulled myself up onto one of the chairs. There, sitting in that room, I wondered if I would ever walk properly again. I thought I was crippled from the pain.
"Fuck!" I lowered my head onto the table and cried. The pain in my ribs soon put a stop to the sobbing. I could see my right hand, blood soaked through the bandages. At least that brought a smile to my face, seeing Prig's blood on my hands. It was too much to hope he was dead, so instead I hoped I had taught the filth-licking bastard to fear me.
When the door to the interrogation cell finally opened I didn't even lift my head from the table. I listened to the footsteps as the overseer approached and slid down into the chair across from mine. I heard the door shut again, and I waited for the overseer to say his piece. I didn't have the energy for his games. All I wanted was to curl up into a ball next to Josef and sleep.
I think it was the thought of Josef that strengthened my resolve. I wasn't the only one beaten by Prig, and by stabbing the foreman I had put Josef in even greater danger. I knew there was no way Prig would have sated his anger with a single beating, bullies never do. Everything to them is an escalating series of offences and insufficient retribution. There would be more, I realised. Prig wouldn't stop until one of us was dead, probably me, and even then, he'd just pick someone new to bully. Fuckers like that were never happy unless they were tormenting someone else, as if they could make their own worthless lives better by making someone else's shit.
It took a lot of effort to raise my head and sit up straight in the chair. I look back now, and it seems like it should have been an easy thing, yet at the time it felt a heroic achievement. The overseer watched me, a curious look on his hawkish face. It was the first time I truly felt like a prisoner. I was in rags held together by filth and hope, and bleeding from a dozen different places; and bruised everywhere else. The overseer was in a pristine military uniform. I knew then what he was about to offer me.
"I can make it all stop," he said.
I have to hand it to the fucker, he knew what he was doing. If he had offered me the deal any earlier I would have scoffed and it would have strengthened my resolve, but he waited until I was at my lowest. He waited until I was beaten and bloody, until the only other person I really cared about was in a similar condition. Worst of all was that I knew Prig wasn't going to stop; if anything, he would only get worse from here on out. More vindictive. More brutal. The overseer was the only one who could stop it. He knew it. And I knew it. By all the pox-ridden whore-faced fucks, he had won and we both knew it. He didn't even have the good grace to look smug about it.
"Perhaps you still think some of vestige of the Orran empire will be coming to rescue you?" The overseer paused and shook his head. "There is no Orran empire. The entire Orran bloodline has been wiped out. Your emperor is dead. He died before your armies even laid down their arms."
Truth is a flood, waters rising while we hide inside homes of self-deception. There is a point where water starts gushing in under the door, through the cracks in the windows. You cannot hide from the truth, nor barricade against it. You can only run from it, and I had nowhere to run. It made sense. I'd always wondered why the Orran army had surrendered. We could have fought on. I could have fought on. But the call to lay down arms was given, and now the overseer was telling me why. I knew it for the truth. The doors burst open, the windows cracked, and the water flooded in. And I drowned in the truth.
That was the moment I felt something snap inside. Hope shattered and all I could do was stare at the pieces with no concept of how to put them back together again. At that point I could see my future laid out in front of me. I could read it in the broken bones I would suffer and the scars my flesh would form. How long before Prig took one of the beatings too far? How long before he did something to me or Josef that wouldn't heal? What if he had already?
And the overseer was offering to take me away from it all. I had no hope of rescue from the people who had raised me and trained me. The empire I had sworn to serve was gone. But the overseer was the rescue I had been waiting for. He was the answer. He who had only ever asked me questions. He'd tried to help me, offering me food and fresh clothing. I looked up to find him nodding at me, a genuinely concerned look on his face.
"I can make it stop," he said again. "I just need one word from you, Eskara. Just one word, and you don't have to go back down there. I'll send men in to pull out Josef too. Just one word and you can see the sky again."
He had me and we both knew it. He was offering everything I wanted. A way out. A reprieve from the constant fear and pain. The sky, my freedom. He was offering too much. He knew too much. How did he know to entice me with the sky? The horizon I longed to see again. The reward I had promised myself for getting out of the Pit. I had never told him that, it was a secret I kept to myself, uttered only in stolen whispers as we slept.
"What word?" I asked through swollen lips. I could almost see the light, natural light. The sun shining down from the sky. I could almost taste it. I don't think I have ever wanted anything so much in all my life.
"Yes." The overseer smiled. "I just need you to say yes."
I could have said it then. Looking back, I wonder how different the world might be now if I had just agreed then and there. Maybe it would be a better place. Maybe the friends I've lost would still be alive. Maybe my children would never have come to be. I'm certain the world would be a better placed without Sirileth, yet I love her despite all she has done.
"To what?" I asked. Exhausted and broken as I was, I still cou
ldn't agree without knowing the terms.
"To serve the Terrelan Empire," said the overseer, making it sound like the most reasonable price in the world. As if it wasn't a betrayal of everything I had been raised to believe. "You are the last living Orran Sourcerer to agree, Eskara. Join us and both you and Josef can be free. You can have all the luxuries you learned to enjoy from your old life. You can have that life back again, only without the war. Just say yes, and the Pit will be a distant memory you can forget."
Sometimes I curse my defiant nature. There I was with the rescue I had hoped for and dreamed of right in front of me, and all I had to do was ask for it. Some prices are too heavy to pay no matter the reward.
"Never." I tried to spit at the overseer. You should never try to spit with swollen lips, all you'll end up doing is dribbling on yourself.
The fake smile slipped from his face, replaced by a deep frown. "I can't guarantee your safety anymore, Eskara," he said. "Nor Josef's. Refuse me now and I'm done with you. No more protection. No more offers. This is your last chance, Eskara."
I leaned forward and sniffed, treating the overseer to the iciest, fuck you stare I could manage with a beaten, swollen face. "I've been done with you since the first time we met."
The overseer stood and shook his head. He pulled open the door and waved to the soldiers outside. "Throw her back into the Pit and make sure she doesn't return. I never want to see her again."
He got his wish. For all the good it did him.