Students of the Order

by Edward W. Robertson

  "I owe you lots," said Bronzino after a while.

  "You're drunk: I'm pretty sure it's the other way around."

  "'The life of our power is found not in the Principles of the Order, but in experience.' Wizard Wendell said that, you know."

  "Didn't he also say the dragars should be kicked out of the Alliance for being cold-blooded?"

  "It doesn't mean he was wrong about everything: I'm proof of that."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I've learned lots from books, and the Principles. But if it wasn't for the experience of being around you, being around Wit, They could have gotten me. They would have gotten me for sure. I'd be another Chattiel. Blind to the cruelty. Lost in books about how we are better than everyone else."

  "I don't know…"

  "Then take my word for it. I promise you Hanny, by the Power of the Order…"

  "You don't need to promise me anything."

  "I promise you that I won't forget what you taught me. But—and this is why I think they could have got me—Crane and his group know things about power that the rest of us have forgotten." At some point during the afternoon, neither could remember when, Haniel had told Bronzino what Aglovale had told her about Crane's plans for Chattiel. "They know that it has to do with controlling wizards, and they know the key to that is starting when they are young. The rest of the Order takes obedience, belief for granted, and just kicks us around to make sure we're tough enough. But to control the Order, you need to be smarter than that. You need to turn a wizard into something worthwhile when they are impressionable…like you and Wit did for me and Mantyger, even if you didn't mean to. What if Mantyger had become one of Crane's? It was an accident, but you might have saved the Order, Isadoro itself."

  "That's taking it a bit far, isn't it?"

  "She's not like other wizards. She was fifteen seconds away from being able to see the street corner that little boy was on. The rest of them will be scrambling around for hours, looking for a child."

  "Poor little son of a bitch," said Haniel sadly.

  "I'll drink to that," said Bronzino. He dumped his water on the ground and poured himself ale from Haniel's mug. They touched glasses and drank.

  As they went to put Haniel on her horse, they noticed a man with a staff in the robes of the Order.

  "That's Harlon," said Bronzino, "I know him some, I wonder what he is doing here at this hour."

  They went over, and Harlon congratulated Haniel on her new promotion. "What's going on?"

  "It's that damn child, the one from the market with the Gift. We haven't been able to find him yet, but we spoke to a neighbor. Apparently the boy's mother told the neighbor that she had lived in Kroywen and known the Order all her life, and that she would rather die than see her boy turned over to us heartless monsters—so now she's running all over the city to keep us away from the tyke." Harlon paused to laugh. "Just amazing to see ignorance like that, in the capital, no less. Anyway, we'll get him eventually. I'm watching the gate, to make sure they don't leave. Have a good journey," he added to Haniel.

  They walked back to Haniel's horse. "Hanny," said Bronzino, suddenly urgent. "Teach me the spell you used to find Gondorf."

  "Didn't use a spell, I just met him."

  "You used a spell, Hanny, you were just too drunk to know it."

  "Well, then how the hell can I teach you?"

  "I haven't time to explain. Do you mind?" He reached a hand out and touched her forehead.

  "Do what you want," she said.

  She was sucked into a jumble of nausea, grief, and hatred. Disjointed images from the night of the blood fight poured past her, ending with her staring into Gondorf's deep blue eyes. Then she was back by the caravan, Bronzino standing in front of her, nodding competently.

  "What the hell did you…?"

  "Master Cador describes the technique in the second chapter of his book, On the Nature of the Gifted Mind. I haven't time to explain; read it if you are interested. Have a safe journey, Haniel."

  "You too, Bronzino," she said. And then he turned and left, not wobbling the way he had come, but striding with a purpose.

  40

  When Wit and Crane came back to the capital, the main bridge over the river that ran through the city was covered with makeshift shrines consisting of child's toys and flowers. Wit looked a question at Crane.

  "I was wondering myself," said the older wizard.

  At just that moment someone flung a clump of dirt at them, and someone else screamed "Monsters!" They turned their horses and stared down a small crowd. Wit felt sick thinking what Crane would do to retaliate.

  The older wizard just stared at the gathering quizzically, while the assembled townspeople looked scared. He had a slight frown on his face. The gathering that the clump of dirt and the insult had come from was suddenly isolated. Everyone else passing on the bridge gave them a wide berth.

  The group consisted of a little over a dozen townsfolk: laborers, shopkeepers, and one man who might have been a scribe. They grew pale and started to shake as Crane kept looking at them, his frown slowly deepening.

  Eventually the man who Wit thought was a scribe pushed one of the laborers out of the gathering toward the wizards. "It was him that did it!"

  For a moment, Crane seemed pleased, but then his expression hardened again.

  Other voices in the crowd began to murmur and nod in assent. "I saw him," "He did it," "He's the one." The laborer protested, but the crowd drowned him out. For a moment he turned to the wizards for help, but when he met Crane's eyes, he hung his head in despair.

  Crane looked from the crowd to the laborer and then back to the crowd. He made a very small motion with one of his hands and everyone went silent.

  He did not speak loudly, yet everyone heard the one word. "So?"

  The scribe stepped forward, tentatively, and struck the laborer on the back of his head. It was not a powerful blow, the scribe seemed to hurt his hand, but Crane nodded his approval. Someone else stepped forward and gave the laborer a kick that sent him falling to his knees.

  A little after the laborer stopped making noise, the wizards turned their horses to the tower. The townspeople kept kicking the rag-like body.

  "You know," said Wit, who had been staring into the minds of the assembled crowd as something to do to keep himself from vomiting, "that it was actually the scribe-looking fellow who threw the earth?"

  "Oh, yes," said Crane.

  They let Wit rest for the night in an empty room in the tower that was now his home, and then began two days of giving reports and getting berated. Everyone was in a bad mood and distracted. It wasn't until the third day that he found Mantyger— even she seemed glum.

  "It was just revolting," she said, "so sad. They found a little boy with the Gift in the capital, but he got away. His mother was a native 'wenian—been around the Order all her life, never liked us anyway. Then her husband, the child's father, got himself Bound to the Order over some debts, and was sent to work on the tower. He fell off of it, to his death, about the time you left. But We concluded that it was mostly his fault he fell, so the wife got hardly anything.

  "So, she took, really, a very dark view of the Order, and then it came out that her son had the Gift and would be taken from her to Us. She ran when We came for him, and everyone spent the day scrambling around. I feel rather awful: I could have found him quickly, my way, and maybe it all would have turned out better. But I didn't want to put in the effort, and I had no idea it could go so horribly wrong."

  She stopped to sigh. "Anyway, We called in the city watch, and it was a watchman spotted them near the bridge. He ran towards them, and she went onto the bridge, and the watchman kept coming—and she jumped right off the bridge, with the boy in her arms. Both of them gone."

  "All the gods…"

  "I know. It's got everyone shook, wizards and townsfolk. Some of the common people are making the mother and child out to be martyrs, using it to agitate against us, and a few lords who We've
gotten along with badly have begun to egg them on."

  Wit told her about the incident on the bridge with Crane.

  "He did that without using the Gift?" said Mantyger. "He really is something."

  "That is the part of the story that you find remarkable?"

  "Well, no, of course. He's shockingly evil, all that. But he is very, very good…at magic. Doing something like that without magic—you really need to see right into the heart of things. But he is rotten to the core: we had an awful time with him ourselves while you were gone." She told Wit about Haniel, the Puppet ring and the blood fights.

  "Do I even need to tell you anything?" Wit asked when she was done.

  She shook her head, smiling brightly. "All the gods, I'd give my teeth to have met the Gift-Orcs. New beings with a new kind of magic. I can't think of anything more interesting."

  "Are you losing your edge? Did you miss all the times I nearly died or was severely beaten?"

  "Of course not—but you're here now, so it all worked out in the end. And most of that could have been avoided if you were slightly better at magic. And you got to meet that princess. I really liked those bits." Mantyger grinned and wiggled her eyebrows.

  "You're terrifying, and gross, and I can't believe how much I have missed you." They embraced, with tears in their eyes.

  As he was leaving, Wit asked about Bronzino, and Mantyger shook her head.

  "They like to have continuity among the Adepts—not have newcomers show up to an empty house, and one just got here a few days ago. And he's been due to be promoted for ages, should have gone before Hanny, if things were normal. Anyway, someone read through the old documents, and realized that there is an abandoned position called 'Prefect'—which is a kind of a chief of the Adepts—and they were going to try to make him that. But then it turned out that he had read the same documents and went and volunteered for it. So he was stuck."

  "You seem unhappy?"

  "He ought to be a wizard—nothing is actually his fault, and he's picking up the bill for Hanny's mess, again. It's not fair."

  "Well, but what about the new Adepts?"

  "What about them? They'll probably be fine. Magic, and everything."

  Bronzino seemed cheerful when Wit went to see him the next day. The new Adept was a short fifteen-year-old girl with dark hair and wide eyes who struck Wit as frighteningly timid. It wasn't until he nearly left that it occurred to him that she might just be shy around wizards, which was what he was now.

  The girl was sitting at the table in the sitting room, reading and taking notes. A little black monkey was watching her ink dish, and a boy of about five years old was watching the monkey. Every so often the Adept would pause in her work and hand her ink dish to the boy, who would hand it to the monkey, and they would both watch it drink the ink. Then the Adept would take the dish back, pour in new ink, and continue with her work. Both the boy and the monkey watched her happily and patiently.

  In addition to the girl, the boy, and the monkey, a Bound man with the mark of the Order was lying on his back on one of the couches, smoking one of the dragar cigars that Bronzino was partial to.

  A crate was sitting on the floor with junk taken out of the old Adepts' rooms—Wit's worn-out blanket, a pile of broken jewelry, bits of string and feathers that had been Mantyger's, a frankly terrifying collection of empty bottles of grain spirits form Haniel's room, and stacks and stacks of papers—including, Wit noticed, some sketches that Mantyger had drawn of all of them two winters ago.

  A smell of cooking came from the kitchen and Wit noticed a young woman moving about in it.

  "I'm glad you're here, Wit," Bronzino said, "I've been wanting to ask you about those books you left."

  "Oh, you can keep them."

  "Thank you, Wit, that's very good." Bronzino studied the room for a long moment. "Hanny left a few books here, and I have some I am done with, so I was thinking we could have a little library. But we will need a bigger shelf for it. Gondorf, tell your chief that you'll need to be back here the day after tomorrow as well, after you've done cleaning out the rooms, and help me hang the shelf."

  "Sure thing, boss," said Gondorf, and went back to smoking. Wit cast a glance down the hallway of open cells: they were all clean and empty. The quarters, in fact, seemed bright and clean in a way that Wit had never remembered seeing it.

  "Just what is going on here, Bronzino?" asked Wit.

  "Oh, nothing much. They were all pleased when I asked to be Prefect—it got them out of a jam. Also there was a sense that things should be changed up a little, what with Hanny killing that boy and all, so they were very happy to grant me some little requests. They've let me hire a woman to help with keeping the place in order; she lives here now with her son. And they have been sending Gondorf down to help me move things about and get the place ready for new arrivals. He's been very useful."

  "I'm sure," said Wit. "Why'd they let you hire someone, though? Don't they have anyone Bound who could cook and clean for you?"

  "Well, they wanted to—but the Principles are very clear about the high degree of autonomy granted the Adepts, and I pointed out that it wouldn't be consistent with having someone under our roof who was ultimately utterly responsible to the Order. So in fact, if we were to have a live-in house keeper, it would have to be someone from outside the Order."

  "I see," said Wit. "You seem to be taking this all rather seriously."

  "Of course. If there's going to be someone seeing to it that the Adepts are looked after, I mean to do a proper job."

  "Well, good for you. I think I am with Mantyger: in your position, I would have kicked up a fuss and made them give me a staff."

  "But that's because you had already done your part: now it's my turn."

  Wit looked at him questioningly, but Bronzino didn't respond. They spent the next few hours getting caught up, and then Wit returned to the tower. Gondorf had not moved from his couch, and was apparently staying for dinner.

  They gave Wit his first official task since coming back the next day: going over the things in Wa'llach's room and sorting out what was to be done with the escaped dwarf's possessions. Things owned by people Bound to the Order existed in a gray area, as far as the Principles were concerned, but it was an accepted custom that they were allowed to accumulate small amounts of personal property, in the course of their service.

  Of course, there was no precedent regarding what to do when someone escaped a Binding, because it had never happened. And Wit was extremely unsurprised to learn that Wa'llach owed money to most of the capital—including several underworld types who were grim and crazy enough to try to collect it.

  Wit supposed that the Order could keep everything Wa'llach owned against the massive debt that he had defaulted on by escaping. But the Order wasn't interested in whatever junk the dwarf owned, and were perfectly willing to let the various gangsters squabble over it under Wit's supervision. The Order was very interested in how Wa'llach had escaped and thought it was possible that some clue related to this was hidden by magic in the room. So one of the Order's experts in dwarven runes was sent along as well.

  Wit arrived slightly late, finding the rune expert, three dwarves, a skirbit, two humans, and a dragar, all assembled outside the large four-story building that was the home of the Bound. All of them, except the wizard, displayed a sinister collection of scars, tattoos, and weapons—frequently all three on the same individual.

  The rune expert was standing off in a snit, apparently because he disapproved of the grammar used by Wa'llach's type of dwarf. The others seemed to be negotiating as a group against one of the dwarves, an old thin man, who commanded the most respect while appearing the least fearsome.

  This dwarf broke away from the group and approached Wit, extending a hand. "Morganoure Savyaige —but I'm Misty Mountain Slim to most folks. You're Wit who rode with him last?"

  "Aye."

  "Well, I'm twenty gold coins short of buying the lot of them out. You wouldn't be willing to go in o
n it or lend it to me?"

  "Go in on it?"

  "Aye, it'll cost eighty coins for me to buy out all their claims, and I have but sixty with me. You can have a quarter of what we find in his room, or you can come to my range and I'll pay you—but that lot wants cash now."

  "What do you mean to do with his things?"

  "Keep them, and give them back if I ever see him again. Eighty coins is cheap to be in the good graces of that devil."

  "I'll go in on it, then, and you can hang onto everything and put in a good word for me." He counted out the coins and gave them to the dwarf.

  "Much appreciated," said Misty Mountain Slim. He returned to the group and distributed the coins. Then Wit, Misty Mountain, and the rune scholar entered the building and ascended the stairs.

  The Bound were housed according to the length of their period, with the shorter ones on the lower floors and the longest on the top. They climbed to the fourth floor, where Wa'llach had lived for the last eighty years.

  The door next to Wa'llach's was open and Wit looked in to see the Bound man from the Adepts' quarters lying on his back on the bed and smoking. Tacked to the wall was one of Mantyger's drawings from the box of junk, a sketch of Haniel.

  Misty Mountain Slim saw the man as well and stepped into the room. "Gondorf of Youngkent: I'd heard what happened to you. I'm so sorry, son."

  "Oh, hiya Misty. It's real nice seeing you."

  "I'm so sorry," the dwarf repeated. "How long do you have?"

  "Ninety years."

  Staring at the picture of Haniel, Wit suddenly realized who the man was, and introduced himself. "I'm also sorry about what happened, and sorry that I didn't say anything to you yesterday."

  Gondorf shrugged. "Nothin' to worry about."

  "Pardon my saying so, though, and I'm sure it doesn't seem that way, but ninety years is awfully light for killing a wizard."

  "Oh yeah, it woulda been longer if it wasn't for that kid from yesterday, Bronzino. He's a good kid. First, he told me how my time would count for double if I said they could send me into battle—so I did that. Then he had me shoot for them, so they could figure how much I was worth to them—and I shot real good, so it went down some more. And now, he calls me over to that place, when he can, and lets me loaf around the joint. He's a good kid. Her," tossing his head at the picture of Haniel, "I ain't so sure about."