The Emperor's Mage

by Clark Bolton

  But his right hand was starting to function again, and so with some difficulty he calmed himself and was able to spread the scroll out on the floor in front of him. With heart pounding, he slowly skipped his mind across every other syllable of the arcane-script, as he had been taught to do. This was to allow the reader to discern the intent, and gave clues to how it should be cast, without risking an inadvertent gathering of arcane-energy.

  Keeping his head down and his eyes lowered, he dared to ask, just above a whisper, “On myself, master?”

  “Yes!” came the sharp reply. “It is your duty to perform.”

  As soon as his lips formed the first syllable of the spell the ecstasy came, and so for a few moments he worried about nothing, not even a full bladder. What followed next was a marathon session, involving finding each boy’s peg in turn, then moving it as directed.

  Chapter 2

  “Why do I never have the same class as you, Ich-Mek?” Bose asked after Ich-Mek’s second day as odd-boy.

  “You’re not on the same path.”

  “What path did you put me on?”

  Ich-Mek looked at his friend while trying hard not to get angry. He was trying to schedule all the tasks he had to perform this week, and now Bose seemed to be accusing him of something he had no control over.

  “I put you where Master Fla said!” Ich-Mek replied with a shake of his head.

  Bose frowned at him. “Do you think everybody has different classes?”

  “Yes.”

  They both had assumed things would be as before, when they wore the green: students were marched around from class to class by their owning master. At times when classes required more personal attention, they were broken into halves, or maybe quarters. It was always the same course, though; never something only some of the form were taught.

  Now an odd-boy, Ich-Mek had begun to see a totally different world. It was his duty to see that each boy knew when and where to go to class. Two large schedule boards had been placed in their single dormitory room, one on each side. Those thirty-three boys who slept on the left side consulted one schedule board each morning, and those on the right the other.

  Ich-Mek had suffered through two long, grueling sessions with Master Fla on just how to fill out the schedules. It was then that he learned the seven paths differed considerably. Each course had a two-syllable designator, and he had assumed there would be twenty-one courses. It was simple math: two courses each morning, and one course after the noon meal. Seven paths, three courses a path.

  It wasn’t that simple though, and he still hadn’t figured out why: Classes were smaller, that much he discovered on his own. So at first he assumed classes were repeated throughout the day, so all could attend at some point. But as odd-boy he had to gather attendance cards each master produced at the end of class. Showing up early at some, he had realized the courses of study were too varied to be simply repeats of a course earlier in the day.

  It wasn’t that there weren’t repeats, as there clearly were. Some boys in his form attended the same courses taught at different times. But still others looked to be on unrelated paths, though on Master Fla’s peg-board they were shown as traveling the same route.

  “Maybe there are paths within paths?” Ich-Mek mused as he tallied up the supplies.

  “I don’t think so,” Bose suggested. “It has always been seven paths.”

  “Yes,” Ich-Mek admitted.

  Key-Tar-Om had always been called the “school of seven paths”. One path was to lead to the dragon, it was said. By that, it was meant that the mages on this path would be granted the greatest privilege of all, which was to serve in the capital – perhaps even in the palace of the Emperor.

  Other paths led to service in other provinces – this they had always been told. Each governor of a province was given an allocation of graduates from Key-Tar-Om, and these were then sent to provincial cities. There a newly married couple served for life. An elaborate set of privileges were said to be granted, along with a splendid salary. They would want for nothing.

  “Why are you counting sandals?” Bose asked when he saw his friend make note of the number after picking up each of the five pairs that were bound together by twine.

  Weeks had gone by since the re-ordering, and Ich-Mek had learned from some of the other odd-boys how the supply system worked. It was the same as when they had worn the green robes, but at that time he had never paid any attention to it.

  “Because I’m supposed to!” Ich-Mek replied.

  “Does Master Fla check how many you have?”

  “No, but if we run out, we don’t get more.”

  Bose-Quaa paused for a moment then asked, “Are you sure? Don’t the Pus-Don just bring more?”

  “They don’t bring more,” he assured his friend. “We get two pairs every ten days. If someone asks for sandals, and they don’t need them, I make them wait until they do.”

  “Sounds really difficult,” Bose said sarcastically. “Do you count the coal lumps too?”

  Ich-Mek could feel the blood rushing to his face in embarrassment. He actually had tried counting the lumps but had given up after deciding it was impractical. Instead he just noted generally how full each bucket of coal was. There were six fire-boxes in the long room and, though it was summer, he knew from experience it would be short here in the mountains.

  “Ha-ha,” Bose-Quaa laughed when he saw the blush. “Do you count the rice-cakes every morning?” he teased.

  “No point in it.”

  Breakfast each morning consisted of rice-cakes, or bean-cakes, which were delivered by the Pus-Don servants before daybreak every morning. This had to keep the students’ bellies happy until the noon meal. Each form got precisely sixty-seven cakes, so he had found no point in doing more than simply seeing that each student got one.

  With the food each morning came two buckets of drinking water, and three clean bedrolls. Other than that the only other items a student had were their two sets of clothes, and a small keep-chest. The clothes could be handed off to the Pus-Don any morning, and since they were carefully labeled by the students themselves, he didn’t have to deal with it much.

  All the keep-chests were identical, and the simple rule was that they had to sit against the wall where each student slept. Anything that did not fit in the small chest students could expect to be taken away. At times, students would hang things on the wall, which greatly annoyed Ich-Mek, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before the Pus-Don quietly took these items – usually when everyone was at class.

  The main contents of a keep-chest, such as ink and rice-paper, were his only serious headaches as far as supplies went. Each morning he handed off a list to the Pus-Don of what needed to be replenished, but had been warned such requests were scrutinized.

  “Do you think we have been granted luck?” Ich-Mek asked Bose-Quaa after he had finished stocktaking.

  “Yes!” Bose-Quaa replied sincerely. “I told you what my mother writes in her letters to me. We have everything we need, we don’t even have to clean up like my brothers and sisters do.”

  “You told your mother that?”

  “Don’t you? She asks me to tell her everything, and I do.”

  “Even how you treat Op-Rish sometimes?” Ich-Mek asked skeptically.

  “No!” Bose replied irritably. “He is foolish! I just remind him of it, just like you do.”

  “My mother doesn’t ask questions anymore. Sometimes I don’t think the letters are from her.”

  “Who would they be from?” Bose asked incredulously. “You said your sister is too young to write, and your father can’t. Wish my father couldn’t! He’s been writing in the margins again.”

  Ich-Mek chuckled at the thought of his father doing such. His family made their living from thread-making and weaving. His mother wasn’t really literate, he knew. She had a neighbor read his letters and write the replies, he was sure. She had told him she would do this the night before he had left. It was never mentioned in any of
the letters, and at one point when the handwriting had changed, he had resisted bringing up the subject.

  He was proud of the fact that the sixty-seven silver pieces paid to his family in return for his service to the Emperor was more coins then they would see in several years. Like Bose-Quaa and Op-Rish, he dreamed of owning a big house after he married Yi-La, and then having his whole family come to live with him. He was sure his salary would be enough to make everyone very happy.

  __________________________

  “I don’t understand something…” Ich-Mek admitted as he and Bose sat with several other boys.

  One of them was Es-Long, who he had come to think of as a kind of wise older brother. It perplexed Ich-Mek that someone like Es-Long hadn’t been made the odd-boy for their form, and he had once asked Es-Long this question. The boy’s answer had been startlingly irreverent: Es-Long apparently believed favoritism was involved, and had hinted at one point that perhaps corruption as well.

  “How can someone study a higher block of runes before learning all the lower ones?” Ich-Mek asked no one in particular.

  “Who does that?” Bose asked skeptically. “No master would teach them.”

  Ich-Mek frowned, then thought about his question again for a moment. “I think they would if the primer they were teaching from didn’t contain them all, and I’ve seen some that don’t.”

  The mood in the group seemed to change immediately, and Ich-Mek could see now some concerned looks on the faces of the other boys. “They just didn’t have the greater ones in them,” one of the boys suggested.

  “No they skipped blocks of them,” Ich-Mek assured them. “It was strange because the way they were numbered you couldn’t tell. Whole groups were just…skipped.” He had peeked at the books during his duties as odd-boy, and told them so.

  “You know you’re not supposed to talk about that,” Es-Long said quietly. “Master Fla would take you to the Regent.”

  “Huh?” Both Ich-Mek and Bose exclaimed together.

  Es-Long and several other of the older boys nodded their heads in somber agreement. “Don’t talk about it,” they warned him.

  He was confused now. The older boys had pushed him hard to drop talk of tattling, and to think of themselves as all one brotherhood. Now he had broken a serious rule of etiquette, and, what’s more, he had been fully aware he was doing it.

  “Sorry,” Ich-Mek replied with a deep bow, then went silent for while, along with everyone else.

  “Tang will talk of such things,” Es-Long informed him in a near whisper.

  There then followed some uneasy looks and then a few actual smiles around the group. Ich-Mek hadn’t heard the name before, and couldn’t now imagine who this person might be.

  “Is he…a master?”

  The older boys just shook their heads, but for one, who nodded his head adamantly. “He was a master,” the boy whispered.

  A hushed argument then ensued, with some claiming they had heard the same thing, others suggesting it was ludicrous. This Tang was mentioned like he was accessible to the boys, which confused Ich-Mek even further. Instructors, students, and members of the Pus-Don were all any of them every saw, or so he had always assumed.

  “Go down and ask him,” Es-Long suggested to Ich-Mek at one point, a devilish smile on his face as he said it.

  “Where?” Bose-Quaa asked in a cautious whisper.

  “The cave,” several of the boys whispered at once.

  __________________________

  “I don’t know if I can help you with this, Rish,” Ich-Mek admitted to his friend.

  For years, Ich-Mek had been Op-Rish’s de facto expert to come for help on nearly any subject taught at Key-Tar-Om. In fact, Ich-Mek had prided himself on being able to help nearly any of the sixty-six other boys in his previous form. He and Bose had serendipitously crossed the narrow alleyway that separated Rish’s dormitory from theirs. Almost immediately, Op-Rish had hit him up for help in his studies.

  “Why?” Rish asked in confusion. “Don’t they make you study Imin?”

  “No,” Ich-Mek replied as he looked to Bose to confirm he didn’t as well. “We don’t study any common languages, not even Ibu-Jek, anymore.”

  “How come?” Rish asked in astonishment. “Imin is hard…and I’ve never even met anyone from that province!”

  Ich-Mek shook his head in sympathy. “You study arcane-script still, don’t you?”

  Rish lowered his head. “Not this year. Heard we might again next year…after re-ordering.”

  Ich-Mek shared a concerned look with Bose before daring to ask, “Do you work on new rune-blocks?”

  “Hush!” Bose hissed before looking around to make sure no one was near. “Don’t ever ask that again. I will hit you!”

  Ich-Mek lowered his head shamefully. His world had become far more complicated as of late. What once seemed a simple and assured path to happiness was now becoming painful for some of them. Rish’s admission that he didn’t study magecraft anymore, or at least the major parts of it, should have been more surprising to him, he told himself. But it wasn’t, and it fit in somehow with the mystery of the peg-board.

  “I think there is another board,” Ich-Mek declared softly. “Aaaa!” he cried loudly when Bose punched him hard in the arm.

  “What does he mean?” Rish asked as he pulled an angry Bose back a little.

  “Nothing,” Bose declared, “he just thinks too much.”

  “Good, I guess,” Rish said in a conciliatory tone. “You got more of a mind than the rest of us, Mek. Me anyway!”

  Rubbing his arm, Ich-Mek looked at Bose angrily, but then soon thought again about what he had just claimed. Scooting back out of reach, he then looked around to make sure they couldn’t be overheard.

  “There is another one…and I’ll find it,” he promised his two friends.

  Bose glared at him while Rish went back to complaining about his studies. “Ask Tang!” Bose then dared him in disgust.

  “Shhhh,” Ich-Mek hissed as he looked around again.

  “What does he know?” Rish asked. “Heard he was hard to find.”

  Both Ich-Mek and Bose stared at their friend for a moment in shock. “You heard of Tang?” Bose asked in a whisper.

  Rish shrugged, then began gathering up his papers. “I heard people talk about him. Never met him.”

  “You heard of the cave?” Bose asked.

  “Who hasn’t?”

  “Oh, you have!” Bose declared skeptically.

  “Yeah, just go that way…” Rish explained as he pointed back behind him, “…past the thorn bushes…and over the edge.”

  “Over the edge?” Ich-Mek asked. “You’ve been there?”

  “No! You get expelled for that.”

  They all three calmed down after a time, then they came to admit one by one that they were considering visiting the cave.

  Chapter 3

  The end of Ich-Mek’s first year as odd-boy was at an end, which meant a re-ordering was due. Winter still lingered, and the three of them still talked of seeking out the cave, but never could work up the nerve to do so. Rish had a good working knowledge of the Imin language now, in part due to visits by Ich-Mek, who found assisting with the language not too difficult.

  He had helped Bose as well with his studies, more often than in the past. This was becoming a problem now since he couldn’t fully hide this from the other boys in the form. Cross-class teaching of one student by another was a major offensive, with respect to the rules of conduct within Key-Tar-Om.

  They hadn’t feared Master Fla finding out about it, as the man rarely came to the dormitory. But the other students had become uncomfortable with it, especially as the year went on, and as each student drifted further from his classmates. The drift had been subtle at first, but as odd-boy, Ich-Mek had come to notice it more and more. A boy would ask a question of others, and sometimes get seemingly opposing answers.

  Ich-Mek began to suspect that, one by one, boys were being intentiona
lly taught mistruths about various aspects of magecraft. Listening in on classes, as he came to collect attendance cards, confirmed for him the source of this was the instructors themselves.

  Sometimes he would subtly work up a question for one of his masters, just to test whether he, too, was being misled. So far he hadn’t caught any of his instructors in a lie but had become terrified of it happening someday. The worst part of it was that he suspected the instructors themselves were ignorant of what they taught.

  “This is the last year, you know,” Ich-Mek mentioned to Bose as they walked.

  “Yeah, heard there won’t be more students again until at least another seven years.”

  Ich-Mek nodded his head. “Guess there won’t need to be more mages for a while.”

  “Always need more, that’s what I heard. My mother thinks so anyway, but she does say it works to make us more important.”

  Ich-Mek smiled at his friend. Bose had shared the letter with him at least a dozen times, just like they shared everything else. Rish too, who also got three letters a year from home. It kept their spirits up, and made the end of the current year seem reachable. He tried hard not to think again about his last letter from home. It had been shorter by far than any other before it. His reply had been equally as short, and he was feeling remorseful about that fact now.

  “You going to be odd-boy again, you think?” Rish asked as they approached the school’s square.

  “Master Fla acts like I will be.”

  “He might not be our master though, huh?”

  “Not sure I want another,” Ich-Mek replied.

  He thought about all the times he had spent with Master Fla over the last year. They weren’t good times as Fla was not a kind man, but Fla was predictable and had come to give him some respect. Other masters were not so respectful, he knew. Many odd-boys were regularly beaten, and he was thankful he rarely had been.