School of Swords and Serpents Boxset: Books 1 - 3 (Hollow Core, Eclipse Core, Chaos Core)
Page 74
“At least I understand mine,” I said with a shrug. That much was true. The scrivened vessel was my personal representation of my technique. Nobody else had to like it or even understand how it worked. “Now for the hard part.”
“If you made that much of a mess of the easy part, I don’t want to see how the rest of this goes.” Hagar raised her hands defensively when I glowered at her. “I’m sure you’ll do fine. I was only teasing.”
“Here goes nothing.”
I rested the amulet on the back of my forearm and concentrated on weaving threads of jinsei through its aura and around the sacred energy channel that ran down the middle of my arm. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it didn’t feel good, either. There was a phantom sensation of strings being drawn between my arm bones with every stitch. The jinsei that passed through my skin tingled and unleashed waves of goosebumps across my body. The concentration required to steer the threads of sacred energy around and through my body and the amulet left me sweating.
“That’s pretty neat,” Hagar said. She tapped my amulet with the tip of her finger, and it stayed firmly in place on the back of my arm.
“Whoa, easy!” I shoved her hand away when she tried to pry under the vessel’s edge with her fingernail. I didn’t know if it would hurt, and I certainly didn’t want to find out. “Pick at your own work.”
“I would, but I can’t afford to tie up one of my techniques like you did,” Hagar said with a shrug. “You know how it is. I’m a busy girl, and I never know where the demands of my clan will take me.”
She gave me a quick wink, then bumped her shoulder against mine.
“Yeah, yeah, international girl of mystery.” I rolled my eyes. “Everybody else is trying it out.”
“Everybody else doesn’t have an important meeting with the clan elders tonight,” Hagar said quietly. She looked around to be sure no one was watching us, then leaned in until her mouth practically touched my ear. “We’re getting close, Jace.”
Her words stole my breath. I’d been so focused on the competition and fixing my core, I hadn’t thought much about my other big worry. My mother was out there somewhere. She’d been caught up in whatever it was the heretics were doing. Hirani and Sanrin had promised they’d find her, but there’d been no word from them for weeks.
“Seriously?” It was hard to believe. “You found her?”
“Soon,” Hagar said. “I promise you, it will be soon.”
I leaned back in my chair and pretended to watch the other students practicing the technique-stitching discipline.
In my head, though, all I saw was my mother’s smiling face looking exactly the same as it had the last day that I’d seen her.
Before I’d known she was a heretic.
The Lesson
TRUE TO FORM, HAGAR disappeared after she’d dropped her bomb on me. While I spent my days wondering when the clan would finally track down my mother, my former handler was nowhere to be found. I checked her room, kept hoping she’d turn up in class, and watched for her at every meal. I knew whatever Hagar was up to was important and she’d return as soon as she could, but that didn’t make it any easier to wait for her.
“People are starting to talk,” Eric announced at dinner one night in the middle of November. “About you and Hagar.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I insisted. “We’re friends.”
“Abi’s your friend,” Eric said. “And you don’t stare at the dining hall’s door like you’re trying to set it on fire with your mind whenever he’s late for lunch.”
“It’s not like that,” I grumbled into my coffee. That was the one good thing about Hagar being gone. I could drink as much of the good stuff as I wanted without any grief. “Hagar’s got information I need. That’s what I’m really waiting on.”
“Oh?” Clem said with a raised eyebrow. “Anything we should know?”
“It’s about my mom,” I said quietly. “The clan’s helping me find her.”
Despite my vow to stop lying to my friends, the truth about my mother was one thing I wanted to keep to myself. No one needed to know she worked with the heretics. Once I found my mom, I could convince her she was wrong. Whatever work she’d done with the Machina must’ve been some misguided attempt to heal my hollow core. That was the story I told myself.
It’s what I needed to believe.
In the meantime, I’d keep the truth to myself.
“That’s great news,” Abi said. “Are they close?”
“Maybe,” I said with a shrug. “I’m trying not to get my hopes up too high.”
“They’ll find her.” Clem clasped her hand on my shoulder and gave a firm nod of her head. “I know it.”
I did, too. The Shadow Phoenix clan had become spies who hunted down and dealt with threats to Empyreal society following the Utter War. I’d worked with them on several covert missions last year. Then I’d broken my veil during a battle with the Lost, revealed to everyone that I was an Eclipse Warrior, and made myself useless as a covert asset. Now, I watched my clan’s espionage from the outside looking in. Until Hagar showed up with news about my mom, I was as clueless as any of my friends about my mother’s whereabouts.
What worried me more, though, was that I didn’t know what the clan would do when they finally found my mom. The covert battle against the heretics had heated up significantly in the past year or so, and judging by my last meeting with Sanrin, the casualties were mounting. I wasn’t sure that my clanmates wouldn’t take their anger at our losses out on my mother.
I also wasn’t sure they wouldn’t be right to do so. She had, after all, created me and the Machina.
“Mr. Warin,” Headmistress Cruzal called from the dining room’s door. “Please come with me.”
“Bummer.” Eric pointed at the plate I’d been too preoccupied to touch. “Can I eat that?”
“Sure.” I groaned, slid my plate over to my friend, and pushed away from the table.
Cruzal watched me cross the dining hall with sharp eyes. A faint smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, though it did nothing to warm her eyes. She still hadn’t forgiven me for pushing my way onto the School’s team, so if there was anything that made her happy, it couldn’t be good for me.
“Good morning, honored Headmistress,” I said formally. Even if Cruzal and I didn’t get along, there was no reason for me to be rude to her. That would only make my already complicated life harder.
“Your initiates need your attention.” Cruzal put an arm around my shoulders, forcing a friendly smile. She steered me out of the dining hall and guided me through the school. “They’re not pleased about the holiday situation.”
I groaned. Those poor kids knew less about what was going on in this school than I had during my first year. I’d have to explain that no students were allowed to leave school grounds during their initiate year. That meant winter vacation in their dorm towers with only each other, the wardens, and a skeleton staff of spirits and low-ranking administration employees to keep them company. The students wouldn’t starve, but that first year was hard.
For the hollows, it would be even worse. They’d been recruited through Rachel’s outreach program and then found themselves in a world they didn’t understand. They’d all been homesick from the day they’d arrived, and being stranded at school during this time of year would only make them feel worse.
“I’ll talk to them,” I said. “And let them know I’ll be here with them during the break.”
“Nowhere to go?” Cruzal seemed more than a little pleased by this. “Oh, that’s right. Your father’s dead, and no one knows where your mother is hiding out. You’re practically an orphan.”
Cruzal’s petty jibes rolled off me. If it made her feel better to take shots at my misfortune, I’d let her have those minor victories. I had more important battles to fight. Plus, when I didn’t respond to her insults, the headmistress lost interest in taunting me. We finished the rest of our walk in silence, and she didn’t even say anything afte
r she’d unlocked the classroom door, just left me alone with the hollows and their guard.
“They told us we can’t go home,” Christina called from her seat near the back of the room. Though she’d picked up cycling quickly and was now one of my most advanced students, she was always angry. “We’re prisoners.”
“You’re not prisoners,” I corrected her. “You’re guests of the School. It’s for your own safety.”
“I don’t feel like a guest!” Ricky, a sharp-eyed kid from the Los Angeles undercity with the long, lean muscles of someone who’d seen a lot of hard labor, rarely spoke. He must have been really upset to raise his voice like that.
“It’s a school tradition,” I said. “None of the initiates go home for vacation during their first year. It gives you time to reflect on what you’ve learned and master anything you’ve had a hard time with.”
“Do our families know we won’t be home for the holidays?” Christina asked. “I don’t want my mother to worry about me.”
Her words brought back memories of my first year at the School. My mother had been reluctant to let me go. I hadn’t spoken to her at all during that year until I’d called to warn her that Tycho Reyes and his family were coming after her because of my crimes against him. I chewed at the inside of my lip and clenched my fists at the memory.
“All of your parents know you won’t be home,” I said. “Besides, you’ll be so busy during the break you won’t even realize you missed it. I’ll be here, and Hahen will help me work you to the bone.”
“That’s supposed to make us feel better?” Vera, a skinny twig of a girl who always seemed to have dirt under her nails, snorted. Her accent marked her as a native of the New York undercity, though she never talked about it or her home life. “We need a break.”
“A break is the last thing you need,” Hahen said as he appeared at the front of the room. “None of you has advanced at all since you arrived.”
The students had worked hard to master cycling, and Hahen and I had given them plenty of hard work to keep them busy. It was time to reward them for their efforts.
“Hahen,” I said to the rat spirit, “can you get the case?”
The students had no idea Hahen had stored all the vials they’d filled in an old servant’s tunnel connected to the classroom. It was too small for me to walk through, and Cruzal clearly didn’t know it was here. Hahen, though, could navigate it with ease. He’d used that same tunnel to smuggle my share of the aspects and jinsei out of this part of the School and into my room.
“You think they deserve it?” he asked. “I’m not so sure they do. There’s been so much whining out of them today.”
The hollows had all leaned forward in their desks and watched us intently.
I pretended to consider his words, then shrugged. “Consider it an early holiday gift.”
“If you insist,” Hahen called as he made his way to the back of the classroom. He vanished into the cupboard, and a moment later I heard the sound of the hatch closing behind him.
“What’s going on?” Christina asked, her eyes narrowed. “Is this some sort of trick?”
“You’ll see,” I said. “I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”
Hahen emerged from the cupboard a few moments later, a battered old case he’d liberated from somewhere on his shoulder. A faint jingling sound accompanied his steps, and the students couldn’t tear their eyes off of the rat spirit as he made his way to my desk at the front of the room. With a final grunt, he heaved the case up onto the desk and clapped the dust from his dexterous paws.
“There you go,” he said. “Perhaps they will work harder when they understand what is at stake.”
“Maybe you’re right.” That drew groans from the class. Despite their protests, I had their attention. Curiosity aspects burned in their auras, and they fidgeted in their seats. “Oh, fine. I’ll give you all a little taste.”
I popped the latches on the front of the case and spun it around to face the class. Silver light emanated from inside the open container and lit sparks in the students’ eyes. They’d seen jinsei often enough to know what the purified sacred energy looked like.
“You’ve worked very hard,” I said with a glance toward Hahen. The rat spirit grunted noncommittally. “This jinsei is most of what you’ve purified so far this year.”
I pulled a single vial from inside the case and tossed it to Christina. The glowing container tumbled through the air, and I was pleased when she caught it easily.
“It’s pretty,” she said. “It’s hard to believe that we purified all of that.”
“It’s yours.” I gave her a shallow bow and clasped my hands in front of me.
“I can’t take this,” she stammered. “It’s worth far too much.”
“You purified it,” I said with a shrug. “You deserve your fair share.”
While it was important for me to teach the hollows as much as I could about their cores, it was also important to me to treat them fairly. Tycho had used me as a slave in exchange for my tuition to the School during my first year. I’d worked myself half to death, and I’d had to steal back some of the jinsei I’d purified to help me pass my classes. That theft had been necessary to stay at school, but it had almost cost me everything. I wouldn’t put any other students through that. We’d split the jinsei evenly.
That was the honorable thing to do.
And, it was totally worth it to see the students’ eyes light up when I tossed a vial to each of them. One purified vial was worth a month’s rent on a two-bedroom apartment in the undercity. They or their parents would’ve had to work a week, maybe two, in the labor camps to make that much money.
Most of the students were skilled enough now to purify a vial in less than an hour.
I saw the light of realization flicker in their eyes. Their hollow cores couldn’t hold jinsei for any length of time, but that made it easy for them to separate polluting aspects from the sacred energy. Even if they never advanced and never healed their cores, they could become very wealthy simply by turning polluted jinsei into pure, silvery power.
The door to the classroom burst open. A tall, stocky man strode in, his heavy scarlet robes dragging on the floor behind him. A cavernous hood hid his face, though his green eyes shone through its shadows. A line of gold scrivenings crawled down the right side of his chest and spelled out his name and title. It chilled me to the bone when I read them.
Inquisitor Rhône.
“Well, what do we have here?” His voice held a faintly European accent and a healthy splash of contempt. “Early presents for your students?”
“Excuse us for a moment, class,” I said. “Let’s step outside, Brother Rhône.”
The inquisitor was a big man, and his office gave him a tremendous amount of power. But his core was only adept level, which put him well below me. Even wounded, the weight of my core’s attention was enough to get Rhône moving. He didn’t like that, and I didn’t care. I’d just gotten the students calmed down. I didn’t need an inquisitor riling them all up again. I led the man out of the classroom and closed the door behind us. I shot the guard stationed outside a nasty glance and made a mental note to find out exactly why he’d allowed anyone to interrupt my class.
“What are you doing here?” I barked, with all the power I could put behind the words.
“I’m here on official business for the Temple.” Rhône tugged his robe straight and squared his shoulders. “Brother Harlan sends his regards. How are you doing Mr. Warin?”
“I’m fine,” I said. Then to the guard, “Get lost. This isn’t for your ears.”
The guard nodded briskly, then wisely took off. I wouldn’t want to be caught in range of my growing anger, either.
“Important business.” Rhône crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall on the opposite side of the hallway. “Even more important, now. Where did you get all of that jinsei?”
“I made it,” I said. “Not that it’s any business of yours.”
I’d never really considered that question. The School was funded by taxes on every Empyreal citizen, exorbitant tuitions, and donations from the clans to cover scholarships. I’d assumed the money for the outreach had come from the School itself. After all, we could always use more students, especially if those students might be Eclipse Warriors.
“Why would the Church give money to the School?” I asked.
“We didn’t give them anything,” Rhône said. “It was an investment. Clearly, a very good investment.”
“You can’t take that jinsei,” I said. “It’s mine.”
“Is it?” Rhône asked sharply. “You just told Christina that she’d purified the jinsei and deserved her share. Or did I mishear that?”
There’d been no one else in the room when I’d said those words. Even if Rhône had been standing outside the door at the exact instant I’d told that to Christina, the thick door and walls would have made it all but impossible to make out what we were saying.
“You know how it is with these farcasters,” Rhône said with a shrug. “Sometimes they’re not as clear as I’d like.”
He twisted his hand with a stage magician’s flourish, and a rectangular black slate appeared between his fingers. Images drifted across its surface, and faint, familiar voices leaked from the dark rectangle. The inquisitor tossed the slate to me, and I snatched it from the air.
The glossy device showed me a perfect view of my classroom. The initiates whispered excitedly to each other and examined the jinsei in the vials I’d given them. Hahen watched them with a faint smile twitching at the corners of his lips. From the angle, the farcaster transmitter had to be near the ceiling at the front of the room.