“Shame I have to leave so soon,” said Ruddle. “I’d’ve liked to see you settled in that school of yours first.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Silo.
“Maybe so. Been wondering what happens to all these seers, though. Every year half a dozen or so arrive, but you never hear much about them afterward. A bit of a worry, that.”
Silo thought so too. “Don’t worry about it. Me and Orlan—Maximillian have made plans. If we don’t like the Academy, we’ll leave.”
“That’s what I was coming to. If things go wrong, you’re to let me know. You can send word by any of the guides as are headed west.”
“Are you guiding the inspectors again?” said Silo.
Ruddle shook his head. “I’m through with the Government and its inspectors. When we were back in the Wildwoods and you warned those villagers about the tax squad—well, I found I was glad you had, and when a man gets to thinking like that it’s high time he works for someone new.” His face brightened. “And it’s coffee merchants I’m guiding this trip, so it’s all worked out for the best.”
Silo had known he would miss Ruddle, but he didn’t realize quite how much until he watched him ride out into the teeming streets, turning in his saddle to give him a final wave. As he watched the crowd close over Blossom’s vast rump, Silo wished with all his heart that he were going with them, but then he remembered his days on the marsh, when being a government seer had been the height of his ambition. He had traveled many weary miles to get here and he might as well give it a try—or at least until Orlando was well enough to travel.
He took a roundabout route, for he was in no hurry to get back to the Academy. Ever since the incident with the lettuce he found it difficult to be in Elgarth’s company without being overcome by the desire for violent revenge, and so it seemed safest to avoid him as much as possible. Now his way led him down a street lined with stalls where market traders bawled for custom. For the first time in his life Silo had money in his pocket, for Ruddle had given him a fistful of coins as a parting gift, and he paused before a stall selling buzzard products.
“They flies in the skies and they goes in our pies! Buzzard pies! Buzzard pasties, fresh baked this morning! Get your lovely buzzard burger here!”
Silo bought one and regretted it instantly, for it took inedibility to new and hitherto unsuspected heights. He took a mouthful, froze where he stood, and then apprehensively lifted the lid of the bun. Concealed within was a lump of grayish matter clotted with feathers and claws, and he promptly spat violently into the gutter.
“I’ll have it if you don’t want it.”
A ragged boy had appeared at his side.
“It’s vile,” said Silo as he handed it over.
“Buzzard’s fine. You should try the vulture burgers.”
Silo made a mental note never to do so. The boy took a ravenous bite and Silo hurried away. It was not just the buzzard burger that sickened him. He had been in the Capital only two days, but he was already aware of a mysterious twilight world that existed behind its bustling façade. The Capital was home to an army of watchful, ragged children who kept to the shadows and alleyways, emerging at dusk to scavenge for the spilled fruit and rotten vegetables that lay in the mud. In his darker moments Silo feared that he might come to share a similar fate, for it seemed that the Capital was a cruel place for children who, like himself, had no parents to watch over them.
Silo’s new home was an uninviting one. The Academy’s dark edifice soared above Cowcross Street like a cliff face, and its entrance was flanked by two towering statues of warriors. They wore stern expressions but little else and held swords in their hands. An inscription ran above the massive bronze door they guarded—THIS INSTITUTION IS DEDICATED TO SERVICE, OBEDIENCE, UNITY, AND PROGRESS—and Silo’s tiny figure was dwarfed by the structure. Two sentries stared suspiciously, then opened the door a crack for him, and as he slipped into the cavernous hall it swung shut behind him with a sound like a thunderclap. The school for seers took up a wing on the second floor, but the rest of the Academy was devoted to military training, and Silo climbed a flight of stairs lined with paintings of bloody battle scenes and severe-looking soldiers. He passed other students as he went, hulking teenagers in black uniforms. Silo didn’t like the Academy, and he sensed that the feeling was mutual, for students and portraits alike seemed to stare down at him with mistrustful eyes as he passed.
He shoved open the door and steeled himself to meet the vile Elgarth. Presumably Elgarth disliked him quite as much in return, but Elgarth was much better at concealing his feelings, and as Silo walked into the room he turned to him with a look of grave concern.
“I hear you’ve been to the hospital. How’s Maximillian? We’ve all been so worried about him.”
“He’s so caring,” Daisy whispered admiringly to the Arson Sisters as Silo stared at Elgarth and willed his head to explode. But he was spared the effort of replying, for at that moment Orlando himself came staggering through the door. He looked terrible, and Daisy ran up to him uttering sympathetic cries.
“Poor Maximillian! How are you feeling today?”
“Rubbish.”
“Shouldn’t you be at the hospital?” said Silo.
“Too dangerous. A crab pox case has just gone terminal. Now, if you’ll excuse me I really, really need to lie down for a bit.”
Silo led him to his room, and he threw himself down on the bed. Drifting up from the quadrangle below came the tramp of marching feet and the bellowed commands of cadet training officers.
Orlando groaned. “I was hoping this place might be a bit quieter than the hospital. Still, at least no one’s screaming.”
But that was before they met Mrs. Morgan.
—
She arrived the next morning as they were sitting over breakfast. Silo was just polishing off his scrambled eggs when he was startled by a sound like a thunderclap. Turning, they saw a tall, thin woman between forty and fifty years of age standing in the doorway. She was smiling at them, but she held a stick in her hand and the door was still reverberating with the blow she had given it.
“Good morning, children! I am Mrs. Morgan, your new headmistress. I understand that you must all be very excited to be here, but we have work to do.”
The general impression she gave was one of blackness, for she wore a long black dress that clung to her bony body, a necklace of black jet beads, and long earrings of black jet, and her black hair was parted in the middle and skewered back in a bun with long black jet pins. Her eyes were black too, startlingly so in the pallor of her face. Even her lips were colorless, and they were parted now in what Silo supposed was meant to be a welcoming smile, but her teeth were long and yellow, like the keys of an ancient piano, and they gave her face a hungry, wolfish quality.
“Now! Classroom One, if you please, and quickly!”
Silo trooped into the classroom with the others, and Mrs. Morgan began the proceedings by giving them a little talk.
“Well, children! It will surprise you to learn that not all who have applied to this Academy in the past have been genuine seers. It is well known that government-approved seers are generously provided for, and there have been unfortunate cases where dishonest, lying children have attempted to pass themselves off as seers to reap rewards they in no way deserve. I’m sure that is not the case with any of you”—Mrs. Morgan gave them all a thin smile—“but even so, it would be foolish of us not to make absolutely sure! So we like you all to have at least one officially witnessed seeing to your name, one verified by a government representative, before you can be considered a true student of this Academy.”
Silo felt the Arson Sisters stirring uneasily at his side.
“Now!” said Mrs. Morgan. “Maximillian Crow! Your reputation has preceded you. No one can doubt that you have remarkable talents. And as for you, Elgarth, Governor Early has vouched for your gift and given us numerous examples of your seeings. Silo Zyco—one of our inspectors tells us you accurately predic
ted the attack of a zoo animal. That will do nicely. And so that just leaves you, my dears.” She turned her glittering eyes on Daisy and the Arson Sisters. “I know the gift of the seeing is not always a reliable one, but I will need proof of your abilities, and quickly. That way we can be absolutely sure that you are fit to be part of our little class. And now”—she produced a great bundle of papers from her desk—“I always ask my new students to fill out a Character Appraisal Form.”
Silo took his form. It started simply enough: name, age, date of birth—that much was easy, but after that the questions became increasingly strange:
Do you believe in elephants?
Why is goatball our national sport?
Have you ever committed a crime rated three or higher on the Scales of Justice?
Do you hear voices in your head?
There were pages and pages of them. Silo gave up after page four and just wrote no to everything. The others were obviously more conscientious as they took hours over it, and by the time Mrs. Morgan had collected all the forms it was nearly lunchtime.
“Girls, you shall stay. I have a little test for you,” she said. “The boys may go.”
“I think we made a mistake coming here,” said Silo as he and Orlando made their way back to their room. “How long before you’re fit to travel?”
“Give it a day or two. That appraisal form did my head in, and it’s done in already. Do you hear voices in your head? I do now. They’re saying, Run, Orlando, run. That Mrs. Morgan is one evil-looking woman.”
—
Silo left Orlando to nurse his headache and wandered through the empty hallways of the Academy. For a school with only six pupils it seemed unnecessarily large, and Silo was curious to know what else it contained. He set off down a corridor, opening each door in turn, and examined a series of shuttered classrooms full of cobwebs, then a lumber room and a long-neglected toilet. But when he opened the very last door two pairs of eyes stared back at him: huge, unblinking emerald-green eyes. Two sleek black cats lay lounging in the gloom. But they were gigantic, gargantuan cats, ten times bigger than a cat had any right or reason to be. Silo stared at them in astonishment, and as he did so one made a deep rumbling noise in its throat and rose to its feet with a liquid grace, eyes fixed on his. And then it licked its lips. Silo leaped back and slammed the door behind him. And as he stood before it, aghast and trembling, he heard footsteps approaching. Instinctively he backed into a shadowy doorway, his heart racing. There were zoo animals in the Academy! But why?
Mrs. Morgan was pacing down the corridor with Daisy and Stella and Bella in tow, and to Silo’s horror she stopped directly in front of him. She stood with her back to him, the girls ranged in a row before her.
“Well, girls,” she said. “Time for your test! You claim you can see into the future, so tell me—what would you find if you were to enter this room?”
They stared at her miserably.
“Come now! This should present no problem to a seer. I’ll give you one minute to come up with the answer, and if it is not forthcoming, I shall be very disappointed.” She gave them a thin smile. “It would be a great shame, would it not, if I had to let you enter the room to discover the secret?”
And Silo suddenly believed her quite capable of such a cruelty. He realized it was down to him to spare them a hideous, and perhaps deadly, surprise. He stepped out of the shadows, laying a cautionary finger to his lips as he did so, and stood behind Mrs. Morgan.
“Well?” she said.
Silo raked the air with imaginary claws.
“It’s an animal of some kind,” said Daisy.
Silo licked his paws.
“A cat,” said Bella.
He stretched his hands wide apart.
“A big cat,” said Stella.
He stretched them wider.
“A very big cat,” said Daisy.
He bared his teeth in a ferocious, silent snarl and stuck two fingers up—and found himself staring up into Mrs. Morgan’s glittering black eyes. She had turned around at an unfortunate moment, and her fury was frightening to behold.
“How dare you insult me? You insolent, skulking child!”
She struck Silo a vicious blow with her stick, knocking him sprawling to the floor. He uttered an involuntary cry of pain and it was answered, immediately and terrifyingly, by a low growl from behind the door. The girls froze in horror and then turned, wide-eyed, to Mrs. Morgan.
Daisy spoke in a faltering voice. “There are…there are zoo animals behind the door. Two of them. Big cats.”
“Indeed there are, but what kind? I had hoped you would be able to give me a more exact answer.”
“We were just about to,” said Bella, “but then Silo came creeping up and being rude.”
“He did it on purpose,” said Stella. “He was trying to put us off.”
Astounded, Silo rose to his feet, just in time for Mrs. Morgan to box him around the ears.
She addressed the girls. “I am satisfied for the time being. You may go to lunch now. But you”—she seized Silo by the scruff of the neck and shook him—“shall have none, nor supper either! You shall spend both periods writing lines, for I’ll not take insolence from a dirty little swamp child.”
Daisy shot him a compassionate look as she scurried away, but the Arson Sisters did not so much as glance at him. Silo fought down a red tide of fury, and as Mrs. Morgan hauled him off down the corridor his mind seethed with bloody, vengeful visions of her, Stella, and Bella being consumed, down to the very last morsel of bone and gristle, by ravening zoo cats.
—
That afternoon Mrs. Morgan addressed the class in front of a blackboard inscribed one hundred times with the legend: I will not be rude to my teachers. The general effect was rather fine, for Silo had worked off his rage by using a variety of scripts and swooping calligraphic flourishes. Now he sat and surveyed his work with pride for, rude though he might be, no one could deny the excellence of his handwriting.
Mrs. Morgan began her class with a bombshell: “All of you here claim to be able to see into the future, and those skills will have to be developed,” she said, “but we expect more of you than that—much more. You must expand your gifts so that you can see things that are happening in the present too, and more importantly, you must learn to look back into the distant past. That is the most vital thing of all.”
A stunned silence followed. Then Daisy put up her hand.
“But, Mrs. Morgan—seeings are always about the future, aren’t they? No one has them about the past. It’s impossible.”
Mrs. Morgan smiled at her. “My dear child, you are quite mistaken. A great many ignorant people no longer believe in seers. They say it is impossible that anyone can see into the future, but all of you gathered in this room, you have that gift. You have been blessed with minds that are not fettered by the usual human limitations. A seer has a mind that is capable of overstepping the boundaries of time itself. If you can see forward in time, it follows that you must be able to see backward also. You may find it difficult at first, but you will learn. It is just a matter of hard work and discipline, no more.”
Orlando put up his hand. “Why would anyone want to see backward? What’s the point?”
This was obviously the wrong question to ask, for Mrs. Morgan frowned and struck the desk with her walking stick. “Ignorant boy! Because of the marvelous things you might learn about the ways of the Ancients, that’s why! How do you think we rediscovered the rules of goatball? That was the work of seers—seers who worked in this very classroom twenty years ago. But that is a trivial thing, a mere entertainment. There are far greater things yet to discover: the secrets of the power stations; the purpose of zoo animals; how the Ancients flew through the skies.”
“Did they really fly?” said Orlando. “I thought maybe that was a myth.”
“Of course they flew!” Miss Morgan beat the desk again. “The Lion Tower is twenty-two stories high. Do you think the Ancients had nothing better to do
with their time than climb stairs all day?”
She scanned their faces with her weird black eyes. They were so dark they seemed to be all pupil and no iris, and the effect was unsettling, as though she had black holes in her head.
“So this is the work we have planned for you, and I hope you are proud to be a part of it, but we expect you to work very, very hard to achieve our fourfold aims of service, obedience, unity, and progress. Much is expected of you, but there are exciting prospects ahead for those of you who shine at their lessons. Well, children! Are you prepared to shine?”
There was a short silence, then Elgarth said, “I’m sure we’ll all do our very best.”
But Mrs. Morgan was asking the impossible, and Silo had a creeping conviction that their very best would never be good enough for her.
—
However, Elgarth had meant what he said, and that evening he lounged on his sofa, giving serious thought as to how best to shine. The answer seemed a simple one—eliminate the competition. But how exactly? It was the kind of problem he enjoyed, and he smiled as he stretched himself out upon the velvet cushions. The other seers had been housed in comfort, but Elgarth had been housed in luxury. He had been allocated his own apartment, a splendidly furnished one that reflected his status as the son of Governor Early. And it was to his father that his thoughts turned this evening, for Elgarth’s father was a difficult man. He came from a long line of dung collectors but had risen from his humble origins to become a regional governor through hard work, ambition, and an ability to terrify all who met him. Elgarth was among them, for his father wished his sons to be as successful as he himself had been, and he was not a man who took kindly to having his wishes thwarted. Already Elgarth’s older brother was making a name for himself as a commander of the tax squads, a role to which he seemed ideally suited due to his violent and uncomplicated nature, and Governor Early had hoped that Elgarth would follow in his footsteps. But Elgarth believed that his gift of the seeing would enable him to carve a glittering career that would equal, if not surpass, that of his brother: one that would spare him the mud, blood, and general discomfort of a soldier’s life. However, it was essential to succeed if he was not to incur his father’s displeasure. He was confident in his own abilities but it seemed wise to leave nothing to chance, which was why he was currently contemplating ways of ridding himself of Silo Zyco and, more particularly, Maximillian Crow.
Silo and the Rebel Raiders Page 8