by Sharon Green
And then there was the matter of the tests. No one knew in advance who would or would not pass, and insulting an applicant could turn out to mean having insulted a High. At that point the man who did the insulting would certainly be out of a job, and possibly even finding it difficult to get another. Those who claim gold and silver mean nothing have never been in the position of needing to support a family, otherwise they would have learned better.
“All right, here you are,” the man behind the table said, recapturing my attention. “This is your identification as an applicant, and you must wear it at all times. You have a number of stops to make throughout this building, and then you’ll be taken to the place you have to go. Don’t lose these papers, since you’ll need to show them at all the stops.”
By then I’d slipped the chain attached to the card over my head, so I accepted the set of papers as a woman came up to the table. I’d seen the man gesture the woman over, so she had to be the one who would show me where to go. She touched my arm before heading toward a stairway, proving my theory, so I quickly followed along.
The stairs were made of the same stone as the building, and we climbed quite a few of them before reaching the second floor. I would have asked my guide about where we were going and how long the stop would take, but she moved just far enough ahead of me to make conversation awkward. She also had no trouble using both hands to raise her skirt high enough to avoid stepping on it, but one of my hands was full of papers. Also using it to hold up my skirt took concentration, which worked even more against getting involved in talk.
At the top of the stairs the woman turned left, walked a short distance to a door also on the left, then opened it and went through. When I followed I found myself in a small room with a man behind a table, a row of plain wooden chairs and two closed doors behind the man and his table. My guide waited until I was inside then silently left, closing the door behind herself.
“Please have a seat,” the man behind the table said with no more than a glance for me. “Someone will be with you as quickly as possible.”
After that he went back to being engrossed in whatever work he was doing, so I had no choice but to do as he’d said. I chose a chair and sat in it, but it had to be one of the most uncomfortable chairs I’d ever experienced. It had none of the padding it so badly needed, its seat slanted at an odd angle, and its height was wrong for a chair. I didn’t know how long a wait I had in front of me, but even five minutes would have been too long in that chair.
A lot more than five minutes went past, during which time I tried two others of the line of chairs. Each of them turned out to be uncomfortable in a different way, and that fact upset me more than it should have. I had just about worked myself up to asking how much longer it would be, when a man came in the same door I’d used to enter. He also wore an identity card on a chain around his neck, and the man behind the table looked up at him.
“Please have a seat,” he said in exactly the same tone he’d used earlier. “Someone will be with you as quickly as possible. And you may now follow me, ma’am.”
The relief was exquisite when I rose to my feet and followed the man to the righthand door behind his table. He opened it to allow me through, then closed it behind me without entering the room. It was smaller than the first, and only another man behind another table without any other chairs was in sight.
“Good morning, ma’am,” this new man said with another of those pleasant but neutral smiles. “Your papers, please.” I handed over the set of papers, then stood there while the man read every word written on them. When he was through, he looked up with the same sort of smile.
“Everything appears to be in order,” he said, handing the papers back. “You may now go through that door to room twenty-two, which is your next stop.”
The thought that my next stop might well be the test itself kept me silent until I’d walked out the indicated door, and then I was occupied with finding room twenty-two. It turned out to be on the other side of the building, but when I opened the door I saw an exact copy of the outer room I’d so recently left.
“Please have a seat,” the woman behind the table said to me. “Someone will be with you as soon as possible. And now you may follow me, sir.”
The man with the applicant’s identity card got immediately to his feet and followed the woman, then went through the door she opened. Once he was through she closed the door, went back to sit behind her table, and was immediately immersed in her work again.
“All right, tell me the truth,” I said from where I stood, knowing the line of chairs would be just like the first group. “How long will I have to keep doing this, and why do I have to do it? You can’t tell me it isn’t pointless.”
I knew the woman heard every word I’d said, but she let a moment go by before she looked up from her “work.”
“Please have a seat,” she said in exactly the way she’d said it before. “Someone will be with you as soon as possible.”
Meaning she wasn’t going to tell me a thing. My temper stirred at that, making me want to do something outrageous, but I simply didn’t dare. I couldn’t do anything at all that might jeopardize my chance to be tested, not even raise my voice to protest. I’d have to continue on with the pointless, and put up with it for as long as necessary.
“As long as necessary” turned into hours, most of it spent in one or another of those horrible chairs. At one point I just had to get up and walk around a bit, but the current man-behind-a-table looked at me in a way that quickly sent me back to a torture chair. I had to do things their way, his stare said, and it still wasn’t possible for me to argue.
When the time finally came for it to be over, it took a moment before I realized it. I’d had nothing to do all that time but think, and it occurred to me that the government wanted the tests to be as equitable as possible. That way fewer mistakes in evaluation would be made, since it was far easier to come in for testing from one of the city’s neighborhoods than it was to come in from one of the provinces. Some people spent a week in a coach before reaching Gan Garee, and their strength would necessarily be less than that of someone who came from the other side of the city.
So they’d developed a method of wearing down city residents to the point of feeling as if they’d spent a week in a coach. All that endless waiting in incredibly uncomfortable chairs, of being sent from one side of the building to the other for no reason other than being told to do it. After countless hours I felt as wearily impatient as it was possible to be, and that was why it took a moment before I noticed the first deviation from what had become the norm: when I was shown into an inner room, there were two men in it rather than one.
“Good morning, ma’am,” the man behind the table said in the prescribed way. “Your papers, please.”
I handed over the papers quickly, then spent the waiting time staring at the second man. He stood beside the table with his hands clasped behind him, staring at nothing and remaining silent. But he was there, which hadn’t happened before, leading me to hope with all my heart that the time of torture might be over.
“Everything seems to be in order,” the man behind the table said far more quickly than any of his predecessors had done, holding out the papers toward me. “If you’ll follow this gentleman, he’ll take you to your next stop.”
His mentioning another “stop” made my heart lurch with disappointment, but that reaction turned out to be premature. Instead of being led to yet another room in that building, my guide found a staircase and began to descend.
Going down a staircase in long skirts can often be worse than going up, but that time I think I discovered the secret of flying. The man I followed walked too fast for me to take my time without also taking the chance of losing him, so flying was the only way to keep up. I reached the bottom of the stairs without remembering anything of how I got there, and then I nearly ran to keep my guide in sight. If I lost him I’d probably kill myself, and I really didn’t want to die.
I was led outside to the back of the building, and was shocked to discover it was only somewhere around noon. I’d been ready to swear I’d spent a long enough time on the second floor for it to be past sundown, but obviously I’d been mistaken. There were a lot more people around now than earlier, and some of them were moving as close to a run as I was. But I noticed that only in passing, since most of my attention was on the man I followed.
That man led me to one of the very large resin buildings standing in a circle beyond the testing center’s main building to a doorway with the Fire symbol hanging beside it. Rather than continue on in he stopped to one side with his hand out, so I automatically offered the papers I’d handed over so often today. Rather than take them he gave them back with a sigh, then began to retrace his steps while shaking his head and muttering. I didn’t know what his problem was, but I also didn’t care. I was already on the way into the resin building, trying to ignore the renewed thudding of my heart.
Inside the doorway was a rather large room, and once again there was a man behind a table. This one was slightly older than the others had been, and his smile looked a bit more real.
“Good morning, young lady,” he said, holding out his hand. “And how are you today?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered cautiously, giving him the papers. “I suppose it depends on how many more rooms I’ll need to sit and wait in.”
“Ah, yes, you’re from here in the city,” he said, glancing through the well-worn papers. At one point I’d tried to read them myself just to have something to do, but had quickly discovered it wasn’t possible. They were filled with jargon of some sort as well as meaningless abbreviations and referenceless numbers, and therefore were as informative as a child’s scribblings.
“Well, I have some moderately good news then,” he said, looking up after putting the papers aside rather than returning them to me. “There’s only one more room you’ll need to sit in, and that for only a short while. There are some final questions we need answers to, and once we have them everything will be finished. Just go through that doorway all the way to your right, and you’ll be shown where to go from there.”
There was a rather loud-patterned hanging over the doorway he’d directed me to, and I gave him something of an answering smile and then quickly went toward it. I couldn’t quite believe there was only one more session of waiting ahead of me, but the hope of finding an end to that terrible day was enough to keep me from hanging back. I stepped through to see a long hall ahead and three men in an alcove to the left, and as soon as I appeared the three men rose to their feet.
“Please follow me,” one of them said as he stepped forward, and then he led the way a short distance up the hall to the first door on the left, which he opened. “If you’ll just wait inside, someone will be with you very shortly.”
The other two men had followed along behind me, but I was alone when I stepped through the doorway. Or at least I thought I was alone. The room was too pitch black to see anything in it.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, some fool has turned down all the lamps,” the first man said from behind me where I’d stopped, only half a pace into the room. “If you’ll just step forward a bit more, ma’am, I’ll be able to reach the lamp right beside the door.”
The request was perfectly reasonable, but despite my eagerness to see that experience over and done with, I suddenly found myself suspicious. Even in the perpetual dimness of the main building, none of the rooms had been this dark.
“If you’ll point to the lamp, I’ll be glad to light it,” I said, wondering if the man could possibly have forgotten what my talent was. “There’s no need for you to—”
I’d been turning as I spoke, but that was as far as I got. The man’s hand came to my shoulder with a shove, and I was sent stumbling away from the door. Terror hit me then, the sort my husband had taught me so well, and I responded so quickly it would have been frightening at another place and time. I reached toward the man with one hand and all my ability, and a raging inferno roared toward him where he stood beyond the now-closing door. I could feel him trying to raise and hold a barrier with his own Fire talent, but his strength seemed only a small fraction of mine. I would reach him and keep that door from closing, and then I would—
And then I would run into a heavy sheet of rain produced by Water magic! The curtain of rain appeared right in front of the man my flames were about to reach, and the resulting steam made everyone flinch back. That included the other two men, who now stood behind the first, and it was obvious that they were the source of the Water magic. Not a very strong source even working together, and not one that could have stopped my flames for long, but they’d stopped them for just long enough. The resin door finished closing between us, and by the light of the fire raging uselessly against it, I was able to see that there was nothing I could use to open it again.
I slumped in defeat where I stood, the chill of fear spreading through my bones, and let all but a slender flame of fire die. Once resin hardens it refuses to burn, and even melting it takes hours and hours of effort by a team of Middles. I had no idea why I’d been locked into that room, but it couldn’t have been for anything good. I’d learned that lesson from my husband as well, a thought which made me sick to my stomach.
The slender flame I’d kept alight didn’t relieve more of the darkness than what was immediately around me, but I had the impression of a rather large area. It took a few moments before my trembling and agitation were under control, but once they were I intended to use enough light to see everything in that place. I was just about to start when the room began to brighten from a different source, so I let my last flame die and looked around.
Lamps were being turned up all around the room, but they stood in little niches high up in the resin walls behind windows of clear resin. And I’d been right about the room being big, I could now see, but more in its length than its width. Behind me was the door I’d come in by, to the left and right were the side walls about twenty feet apart, and ahead about fifteen feet was another door. I could see that door beyond the large U of metal standing between it and me, a construction that seemed to have no purpose. And the door seemed to have a bar of some sort on it, something to keep it closed rather than something to help open it.
“I sincerely hope you’ve regained control of yourself, ma’am,” a voice said, and I looked up to see the man who’d pushed me into the room. He now looked out of a small door high in the wall, and he seemed almost as shaken as I felt.
“I demand that you let me out of here at once,” I said, fighting to keep my voice from shaking. “I came here for a reason, and being manhandled wasn’t it.”
“You came here to have your talent tested, and so it shall be,” the man retorted, now sounding more sure of himself. “Your task is to find a way to free yourself from there, and if you fail at the task you will die. If this test seems harsh, consider how harsh most failure is. In this instance, you will not live to regret the defeat. Good luck or goodbye.”
He drew back and closed the small door again, and all I could do was stand and stare at the place where he’d been. This was the test, and if I didn’t pass it I would die? If I didn’t pass I would want to die, but what was there in this room to harm me? And in what possible way could my talent be tested?
That was when I heard the rumble and felt the vibration, and looked around to see that the walls to my left and right had begun to move inward! Each wall had ten feet to cross, and then they would meet in the middle of the room! Panic flared as I looked wildly from one moving wall to the other, but then I realized the two couldn’t meet. That strange U-shaped thing of metal in the middle of the room would stop them.
Hope rose in me briefly, only to die out again as I made some mental calculations. The U of metal was narrow, so narrow I would barely have the room to stand when it stopped the walls. And I certainly would find it impossible to pass the U in order to reach that second door. Not that reaching it would help. The moving w
alls would end up covering most of it, hiding it behind the resin I could do nothing against.
Terror came again as those walls rumbled steadily toward me, a terror that screamed at me to do something! I wanted to do something, anything that was possible, but nothing was. I put my hands to my mouth to keep from screaming aloud, the words of defeat ringing in my mind: there’s nothing to do! Nothing to do! Nothing to do…!
CHAPTER TEN
Vallant Ro felt stiff as he climbed down from the upper coach seat at what had to be his final destination. He was a man used to the freedom of the seas, so first he’d been stuffed into a box of a coach, and now he stood before a massive wall with guards at all of its openings. Someone had apparently decided to see just what it would take to break him, and that someone was actually making a damned good start.
But it still wasn’t going to happen. Vallant’s basic love of life pushed its way through his depression, making him smile faintly with self-ridicule. No one was trying to break him, they just didn’t understand what true freedom meant. To them what they did was ordinary and everyday, not an imposition on a man’s right to be unencumbered. Vallant could have felt sorry for them if he hadn’t been working so hard not to feel sorry for himself.
“Just take what’s left of yer ticket to them guardsmen, Val,” the coach driver, Ennis, said as he handed over Vallant’s sea bag. “They’ll tell ya what t’do next.”
“What I’d like to do next is go home,” Vallant grumbled as he took his bag, then he held his hand out. “Thanks for makin’ this trip better for me, Ennis. I’ve enjoyed knowin’ you.”
“Same here Val,” the driver responded with a crooked-toothed grin, taking Vallant’s hand. “Ya made th’ run a lot shorter with all them stories you got. Hope t’ hear the rest of ’em some day.”