School of Swords and Serpents Boxset: Books 1 - 3 (Hollow Core, Eclipse Core, Chaos Core)

by Gage Lee

  “How do you know that?” Eric gave me a skeptical look. “My sensei never said anything about that during my training over the summer, and we talked about the dragon prizefighters more than once.”

  “We spied on them.” Hagar grinned over her mug of coffee. “I think Jace is right. So does Niddhogg. They’re powerful fighters, don’t get me wrong. Until they run out of gas.”

  “After they go through all the jinsei in their core, they need a solid thirty seconds to recharge,” I said. “That’s why the dragons practice in secret, and their combat arts are designed around explosive, overwhelming damage. If a battle goes on for very long, the tide turns against them.”

  “This is only true of younglings,” Niddhogg pointed out. “You try this against a dragon who’s gone through its first molting, and you’ll be dead long before it runs out of jinsei. And the younglings are aware of their weakness. It won’t be easy to exploit it.”

  “That’s a good point,” Abi said. “How do you plan on exhausting the dragons if we face them?”

  “We can’t do it alone. Maybe if my core was at full strength, but not now.” I raised one hand before Clem could start in on me again. “We have to ask the other teams for help.”

  “You’re asking every team to put their necks on the line,” Clem said. “They won’t trust us, Jace. And I’m not sure we can trust them. If they tell us they’ll back our play, then abandon us to the dragons, we’re dead.”

  “That’s assuming any of them would even pretend to work with us,” Eric said. “Most of them value their honor far too highly to lie to another school. They’ll just turn us down.”

  “I have to try.” My food had gone cold, and I didn’t care. My appetite was dead. “It’s our only hope.”

  The Threat

  WE PUT THE WORD OUT that we wanted to talk to the members of the other schools’ teams. While we waited impatiently for their response, school life went on. We attended our classes, we trained with Song and Brand, when they were available, and we hatched one scheme after another to deal with the dragons if the other teams wouldn’t cooperate. And, still, we hadn’t received our reward from the second challenge or any word when the third challenge would take place.

  Not knowing what was going on plagued my team with anxiety. We weren’t sleeping as well as we should have been, it was a struggle to eat enough to keep up with the physical demands of our training regimen, and our wounds were slow to heal. We were all ready to move on to the next challenge and get the Gauntlet over with.

  The hollow initiates seemed just as anxious as I was. I’d convinced the headmistress to let me work with them more often, and for Hahen to take a much more active role in their training. I held my normal classes in the morning twice a week, while the students worked with Hahen on their cycling and basic techniques in the afternoons.

  Unfortunately, even with the extra classes, the students hadn’t made much progress. Near the end of April, things finally came to a head. Cruzal met me outside the classroom, impatiently tapping her foot. She glanced at her watch, then at me, and crossed her arms over her chest. Anger and worry aspects flickered through her aura, and it was clear that she had a bone to pick with me.

  “Good morning, Headmistress,” I said quietly. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “Make progress,” she said. She glanced toward the door behind her, then grabbed my arm and guided me down the hall.

  Or, she tried to. Her core was only a single rank higher than mine, and I spent my days training in martial arts and physical conditioning. Her attempt to drag me away from the door ended abruptly when I didn’t budge. Her hand slipped off my robe, and she glared at me impatiently.

  “I don’t want the guard to hear what I have to tell you,” she whispered. “We need privacy for this discussion.”

  That didn’t bode well. I followed the headmistress past the classroom and down a side passage where the walls were cold stone slick with moisture.

  “The Inquisition is getting anxious.” Cruzal chewed on the pad of her thumb. “That makes me anxious. Where are we at?”

  “The initiates can cycle. They can purify jinsei and store aspects.” I shrugged. “If you’re asking me if they’re healed, no. Most of them don’t even want to be healed.”

  “That’s unacceptable,” Cruzal said. “If we can’t heal those children, the Church will take them.”

  “And you’ll lose whatever money your investors have tied up in this?” I asked sharply. “That’s not why I started the outreach program. These kids aren’t tools. They’re not machines who can produce money for you at the drop of a hat. They’re people.”

  “I know,” Cruzal snapped. “But both of those things can be true. If they leave the School, the people who funded your little experiment will not be happy. That puts the School in serious jeopardy.”

  “They can hardly shut us down,” I said. “Empyreals still need to be trained.”

  “But they don’t have to be trained here,” Cruzal said. “You have to look at things from a bigger perspective, Jace. If the investors can’t get their money back from this project, they’ll get it back somewhere else. Right now, the School is funded from a universal tax on all Empyreal income. What do you think happens if powerful people decide they don’t want to pay that tax anymore?”

  This is what had been worrying Cruzal. She wasn’t merely concerned with making her wealthy patrons happy. This had become an existential threat I should have seen coming. My time with Tycho and Grayson had shown me that wealthy and powerful people could also be petty and shortsighted. They yearned for more money, more strength, even to the point of risking what they had. They didn’t care where it came from or whether it hurt anyone else.

  That, after all, was where the labor camps had started. The weak slaved away in the undercities for the benefit of the powerful. We grew their food. We worked in factories, generated power, and did all the nasty, dirty things that they would never do for themselves.

  Yeah, those were the kind of people who would crater the school to save oboli.

  “Come with me,” I said. I was furious. The Empyreals I’d surrounded myself with were supposed to be bright and shining examples of what it meant to be the best among humans. But I kept seeing the cracks in the truth.

  It was time for my students to see the same.

  Cruzal hesitated for a moment, then chased after me as I stormed back to the classroom. I flung the door open and jerked a thumb at the guard.

  “Out,” I said.

  “Headmistress Cruzal,” he started, then paled when my glare locked onto him.

  Black light blazed behind my dark eyes. I might not be as strong as I once was, but the Eclipse anger was always close to the surface. The corona of ebony light chased the guard out of the room. I waited until the door slammed behind him, then took a seat on the front edge of my desk. Cruzal stood awkwardly off to one side of the desk and slightly behind me with her spine stiff.

  “It’s time to get real, guys,” I said. “We’re running out of time. The school year ends in six weeks, give or take. You have to heal yourselves by then.”

  The students cast nervous glances between them. Ricky cleared his throat and scratched furiously at his scalp, a sure sign of his anxiety. Christina leaned back in her chair, rested her feet on top of the desk, and let her arms dangle at her sides. She wanted to look cool and disinterested, like she couldn’t care less what I had to say, but she couldn’t hide the sparks of fear aspects lodged in her aura like burrs.

  “I don’t think I can,” a small girl in the front said. She peered at me through her mousy brown bangs, her green eyes wet and wide. “I’ve tried so hard, but I’m not getting any closer.”

  “I know it’s hard,” I said. “I also know you can do it. You’ll have access to all the raw materials you could ever need. Hahen will work with you as long and as late as you’d like every day. I’ll do whatever I can to help, too. But this has to happen.”

  “Or what?”
Christina said. She slapped her feet flat on the floor and the twin reports rang through the room like gunshots. Cruzal jumped next to me, and I heard the locked door rattle.

  “Don’t open that door,” I shouted. There was just enough jinsei in my voice to stun everyone into silence, and the students stared at me like I’d grown a third eye. “You really want to know what happens if you don’t do this?”

  Christina challenged me with her stare. She thrust her chin forward, and her fists were clenched into tight balls on the desk in front of her. She was scared, and she hated that. Her rage took the place of the fear and left smoldering fires behind her eyes. She was tough, I’d give her that. Unfortunately, she wasn’t as tough as the Inquisition.

  “You’ll leave the School,” I said firmly.

  “Good, I can finally go back home,” Christina said sarcastically. “Finally, somebody’s listening to me.”

  “You’re not going home,” I said. “If you fix your core, you’ll remain here, and you’ll be safe. I’ll keep training you, and you’ll attend classes with the rest of the students. You’ll have to work off your tuition, but it won’t be too hard. If you fail, though, they’ll take you to Atlantis.”

  “Why?” Ricky asked from the front row. “There’s nothing there but temples and administration. There aren’t any schools.”

  “There is a school,” I corrected him. “Not that it will matter to you. If the Church takes you, you’ll spend the rest of your lives in Atlantis turning out purified jinsei. You’ll never see your parents or families again.”

  The students stared back at me with trembling lips. Their eyes were so wide they looked like they were about to pop from their skulls. I’d babied them for too long, I realized. I should have been harsh with them from the beginning. My mistake hadn’t been in pushing them, but in trying to make them feel comfortable and at ease.

  I’d wanted them to trust me.

  I’d been a fool.

  I hadn’t progressed when I felt safe or comfortable. My progress always came hot on the heels of fear and anger.

  I should’ve made them afraid of me from the beginning.

  “You told us we were safe here,” Christina shouted. She shoved back from her desk and stomped toward the front of the class. Her face was bright red, her eyes leaking enraged tears. “And now you’re telling us we’ll never go home?”

  “This isn’t what I wanted,” I shouted right back. Christina was only two years younger than me. She felt like a child, but only because I’d seen a world that she’d never imagined. “You want to be mad at somebody? Be mad at her.”

  I jabbed a finger toward the headmistress. She stared at me, then narrowed her eyes into angry slits.

  “How dare you,” she spat. “I worked with Sanrin to gather the resources for this project. If it wasn’t for me, these brats would still be in the undercity where they belong.”

  Cruzal’s harsh words hit the students like a splash of cold water. We’d spent so much time together, they’d started to see the world as a battle between what they wanted and what I demanded of them.

  Now, though, I’d given them someone else to hate. We were on the same team.

  The fear and rage I saw in their faces, the turmoil I sensed brewing in their auras, was exactly what we needed to move forward.

  And I hated myself for inflicting it on them. I’d never wanted them to suffer like this. It had nearly broken me.

  But it was the only way to save them.

  I had to keep telling myself that.

  “This is what I’ve been warning you about,” I said, my voice just shy of a shout. “The world will use you. It will destroy you. But only if you let it. There’s a way out of this for all of you. Find your path. Heal your core. Do that, and I promise you, no one will ever get in your way again.”

  With every word, my aura flared with dark energy. I cycled jinsei as I spoke, plucking fear and worry out of the air and feeding it into my aura until it clung to me like an oily shadow. “You can do this. I know you can, because I did it. But if you don’t believe in yourselves, and you don’t push yourselves, then Headmistress Cruzal, or someone like her, will steal your life. It almost happened to me.”

  Cruzal glared at me. There was a strange mixture of anger and admiration in her eyes. She held my gaze for a long moment, then looked away, her cheeks flushed, eyes downcast.

  The students stirred uneasily in their seats. They watched me cautiously, unsure of what I’d do next. Maybe I’d gone too far. The students needed fear to motivate them. But they couldn’t be paralyzed by it.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Cruzal hissed at me in a low whisper. Then, she turned on one heel and strode sharply from the room. Her high heels tapped down the hallway, a rhythmic clatter that grew more distant by the moment. When it finally faded away, I shut the door and gave my students my full attention.

  “It’s up to you, now,” I said.

  “How do we do it?” Christina asked.

  “You already know,” I told her. “Practice your cycling. Strengthen your cores. When you find your path, you’ll know how to heal yourselves.”

  “What if your path is the only path?” Christina asked. “What if we heal ourselves and then end up unraveling, just like you?”

  “Then we’ll figure it out together.” I let out a sigh and pinched the bridge of my nose. I was exhausted by what I’d done, sick to my stomach that I’d made a mistake. I didn’t see any other option, though. I had to save these kids. “Whatever happens next, I won’t leave you. We’re in this together. If you do your best, I’ll do everything I can to protect you.”

  The students nodded solemnly, and I felt a glimmer of hope in the conviction I saw there. I’d done all I could. The rest was up to them. They could heal their cores, I knew it.

  I only hoped they did it in time.

  The Meet

  IT WAS TWO WEEKS BEFORE the other teams agreed to talk to us. When they finally reached out to Hagar, they set very specific conditions for our little summit. They only allowed me to bring one person with me, and they selected the meeting spot. My team argued for what felt like hours before we finally settled on Clem as the second member of our negotiating team. Hagar nearly won until she switched her vote to Clem.

  “She’s got more experience with this kind of thing,” Hagar had said, shrugging. “Her dad’s a politician and her mom’s an Adjudicator. Making deals runs in her blood.”

  “Thank you,” Clem said, though I wasn’t sure she’d really cared for Hagar’s compliment.

  Clem and I set out to find the meeting location well before the appointed meeting time, only to discover that the room didn’t want to be found. We struggled to guide our path, and found ourselves in a strange, sinister part of the school. There were no windows, and the doors were barred and, in some places, sealed with jinsei wards.

  “What even is this place?” Clem wondered. “I’ve never been here before.”

  That wasn’t all that surprising. The School of Swords and Serpents was enormous. Its architecture shifted and changed around the students according to their will and its needs.

  “Someplace they didn’t want anyone to see,” I replied quietly.

  We’d reached a long wooden hallway with niches that were two feet tall and three feet wide. Each space was marked by a simple bronze plaque. At first, I’d thought it was a mortuary. But the plaques held no names and there seemed to be no way to open the tombs. That was creepy but what was far creepier was the complete lack of aspects around us. It was unnatural, and I didn’t like it one little bit.

  I double-checked the medallions I’d stitched to my body before setting out for the meeting. After the last failure, I’d made bigger and, hopefully, better talismans that could hold more jinsei or aspects without melting to slag. If I ran into a fire-breathing dragon in the next challenge, I’d be ready.

  First, though, I had to get through whatever this place was. Every passing second was fraught with tension, and I co
uldn’t keep dark thoughts out of my head. My imagination showed me eerie shadows slithering out of those niches and coiling around our throats.

  Enough of that. I shook my head and pressed on.

  “This is it,” Clem said.

  We’d finally found a tall, narrow door that just felt like the right place. Its top and bottom ends were both slightly curved, an unusual design I hadn’t seen anywhere else in the School. Heavy scrivenings covered every inch of that door, and Clem studied them with a skeptical eye.

  “Anything dangerous?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Mostly privacy stuff. Things to bar scrying and prevent sound from leaking through the door. This patch here looks like it can dampen farcasters inside the room. No one will ever know what happens inside this room.”

  I wondered why the school had a room like this one. Maybe this was where Cruzal had agreed to turn a bunch of initiates into a money factory for her investors.

  I bit back on my anger. I didn’t need to go into this meeting with my black eyes blazing. The other teams clearly didn’t trust me. If I went in there looking like a monster, they’d never agree to work with us.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “We’ve got this,” Clem reassured me. “Just lay it all out like you did for us. They’ll understand.”

  I hoped Clem was right. The fact that the rest of the human teams had taken so long to get back to me didn’t fill me with confidence. If they really wanted to work together, they would’ve reached out to me sooner.

  Before doubts and second thoughts could sour my mood any further, I pushed the door open.

  The low-ceilinged room held a heavy rectangular table crouched on ivory legs carved into the scaly haunches of a dragon. The wooden surface was stained dark and polished to a mirror finish. Five chairs sat on the far side of the table, their legs sunken into the deep carpet that covered the floor. Each of those chairs held a member of the opposing teams. A regal young woman sat in the center chair, her black-feathered cloak hanging from her shoulders like a pair of folded wings. Her lustrous hair was tied up in an ornate braid coiled around the top of her head, bound in place by thick plaits of yellow and red ribbon. She had to be the team leader from the Heron Blade Academy of Yzlanti. Her core was adept level. Powerful, but not as powerful as me.