The Child Guard

by Lorcan Montgomery

  Kane craned his neck as the High Command of the Child Guard entered the temple. General Priscus was first, immaculately dressed in long white robes, looking more like a priest than the commander of a mighty army. Following him were Generals Valens and Lysistrata, the former a tall, powerfully-built man who seemed about to burst out of his dress uniform, and the latter a small blonde woman with a round, youthful face which always put Kane in mind of a particularly contented cheese. Kane knew, despite appearances, the Generals had seen nearly seventy years apiece of service, but the sacred draught they consumed daily prevented it from ever showing on their faces. There was only one member of the High Command who looked as though he had seen all there was to be seen, and he was evidently not going to be attending the service this morning.

  Kane’s balance faltered slightly, and he swayed on the spot, which made his fellow novices stifle laughter, and earned him a glare from Bevan. He fixed his eyes virtuously ahead, on the statues behind the altar. To his left sat the Sister, crowned in dusty silver laurels with robes carved out of the finest marble. At her side rested a large shield with an intricate design carved into its face. In the right hand throne sat the other twin god, the Brother, in a crown of gold, with marble armour, intricately carved. He held a sword, and beneath his blank eyes, his expression was stern.

  Kane remembered the first time he had seen the two statues, how awe-inspiring they had been when, as a child of only seven years, he had been escorted into the temple by one of the ladies who ran the nursery where all the Child Guard started out. He had only seen the most basic pictures of the twin gods before that, the statues had seemed so lifelike some of his peers had cried with fright.

  Now all he could see was the dust gathering in the folds of the Sister’s robe, and the gold leaf flaking gradually from the Brother’s crown.

  As the temple filled and the silence became one of expectation rather than of intimidation, the blue-robed Immaculatii processed in. These were children who looked even younger than Kane and the novices, because instead of a daily dose of the Elixir Innocentiae, they took the sacred draught thrice a day, which slowed their ageing to a bare crawl. Kane had no idea how many years the Immaculatii before him had been alive, but despite their childish faces and small bodies, their age always seemed to come through in their eyes, which shone with a wisdom he and his peers could only wonder at. Immaculatii were not destined for the battlefield, to face the enemy head on with sword and bow and lance, but they guided the Citadel in spiritual matters, saving souls rather than bodies.

  The clear, pure treble voices of the Immaculatii rose in the first hymn, and Kane let the rote practice of years take over, as his brain worried at the fading threads of his earlier nightmare.

  2. Warriors And Healers

  “While there the fair maid lay, she lay,

  The Sidhe did steal her kin away,

  And into the woods they fled.

  And oh! the maid was left alone

  The only human, blood and bone,

  And the babbling stream ran red.”

  Cruachan Folk Song

  After dawn prayers was breakfast, and once Kane had dutifully brought up the rear of his dormitory in the seemingly endless tramp to the mess hall, he was released from their company and allowed to roam free. After acquiring breakfast, in the form of a slightly stale hunk of bread, a piece of cheese, and an apple, he bobbed up onto his toes, searching for the only two people he could call friends in the whole Citadel.

  It didn’t take him long to find them.

  Eder and Terrell made an odd pair. Eder was small and delicate, with cherubic blond curls and a slightly pink, angelic face, his youthful skin marred only by a large white scar, shaped like an X, on the side of his neck. Terrell, on the other hand, was broad and stocky, with olive skin and brown hair which always had a slight greasy sheen. He had a ready, easy smile, and one of his front teeth was chipped from a training accident years ago. Kane completed the mismatched trio perfectly.

  At the end of a long table the two of them sat, a wide empty space between them and the rest of the novices. Even though the other end of the bench was so crowded there was barely any elbow room, nobody seemed to want to fill the gaping space.

  Kane didn’t mind a bit, and slid neatly in alongside. The novices at the other end shuffled further away, if it was possible, and a fight broke out further up as somebody’s limbs got in the way of somebody else.

  “Good morning, Kane,” Eder said with a bright smile, which faded as he saw the state of Kane’s tunic. “What happened to your uniform?”

  “Bevan,” Kane replied, tearing into his bread.

  Terrell leaned over and sniffed, then pulled a face.

  “I know he’s slimy, but I didn’t realise he’d started sweating shit just yet,” he said, chuckling at his own humour.

  Kane smiled weakly. “You know what he’s like; ever since he got promoted he’s had it in for me.”

  “And before,” Eder said with a sympathetic grimace. “He hasn’t liked you since he arrived in your dormitory. It’s likely to be my fault,” Eder said, looking down at his plate as he tore up his bread with long, slender fingers. “I’ve always told you I’m social poison and terrible for your career, remember?”

  Eder’s hand absently brushed against the side of his neck, where the raised white scar emerged from above his collar. As he realised he was doing it, he laid his hand carefully back down on the table. Eder was forbidden from covering, or attempting to cover, the brand on his neck, on pain of immediate expulsion, and he was strict with himself about sticking to the rules of his punishment, no matter how many stares and whispers followed him around. Kane had no idea about the specifics of Eder’s transgression, but the mark was a sign he had spent time in the Citadel’s feared Halls of Correction, and as such was on a kind of final warning. It was hard to believe Eder had ever done something bad enough to land himself in the Halls of Correction, as he was a model Child Guard and followed every rule fastidiously. Kane hadn’t known him before he had been branded.

  “Nah, you don’t get rid of me that easily,” Kane grinned at him. “We’ve been friends for, what, twelve years now?"

  "Almost fourteen," Eder corrected him with a faint smile.

  "Fourteen, then, you’d think you’d have learned by now. I’ll get into the Reapers one day, and so will you, and you’ll be the best archer the Ninth battalion ever had.”

  Eder didn’t look up from his careful study of his breakfast, but a small smile flitted across his face, followed by a look of concern.

  “What happened to your hands?” he asked, indicating Kane’s bloody knuckles, slightly swollen and beginning to scab over.

  “That’s my own fault,” Kane said, scratching at one of the wounds and wincing slightly. “I was trying not to flatten Bevan’s nose across his face, he was making it pretty hard to resist.”

  “I wish someone would,” Terrell said. “You should save up all the kickings he deserves and when you get promoted to Brother-Captain you can give him them all and a few more for good measure.”

  “That’s a fine thought, Terrell,” Kane grinned at him.

  “What you should do is go and get those cleaned and bound,” Eder said, reaching out. His fingers hovered over the back of Kane’s hand, but he was careful not to make contact. Most forms of physical touch outside of combat were forbidden between members of the Guard, unless they had been granted special dispensation, and Eder did not have a healer’s license. “Especially since you’ve been cleaning something disgusting afterwards.”

  “I’ve not got time to go to the healers for a little scratch like this, they’d laugh me out of the infirmary and call me a malingerer,” Kane shrugged, tossing the last bit of cheese back and starting on the apple. “If it makes you feel better I’ll volunteer to be first to the well tomorrow and get some fresh water on it. It’s not that bad, it only started to itch during prayers.”

  “I bet some priest would call that heresy,” Terrell
grinned at him. “Means you’re thinking about fisticuffs when you’re supposed to be worshipping.”

  “You’d know all about that I bet,” Kane retorted, and Terrell’s loud laugh caused a couple of nearby novices to start.

  Far too soon, breakfast was over and Kane bade goodbye to his friends as he left the mess hall, steeling himself for another day in the Citadel.

  It was almost evening by the time he had the chance to cool his heels. Sword practice had been painful but Kane felt he had acquitted himself as well as could be expected, considering the instructor had pitted him against four younger boys. Kane hardly thought it was fair, and even though their swords had been blunted, training swords were twice the regulation weight and he had accumulated a good few bruises. After that, with his muscles still creaking and his uniform smelling worse by the second, it had been the Ninth Battalion’s turn to parade before the General and his lieutenants and be inspected.

  As Kane had anticipated, his stained uniform had not gone down well with any of the instructors or superior officers whose job was to check on the novices’ progress. He had been scolded by everyone of higher rank he’d encountered, in front of the much younger novices who had nervously tittered behind their hands. It was only a blessing the General himself hadn’t attended the midday parade, but one of the two lieutenants, a stocky boy by the name of Eachann, had made it crystal clear Kane was to consider himself lucky to have escaped a beating.

  Through it all he’d stood straight, with the perfect discipline of a Child Guard, answering the questions put to him clearly, promptly and respectfully, and, eventually, it had worked. He had been allowed to return to his place in the ranks, ears burning and face aflame with embarrassment. He’d sorely wanted to drop Bevan in it, to blame him, but what would be the point? Nobody would believe him. Bevan was a Brother-Prefect, a fine upstanding Child Guard on the way up in the world, and Kane was… Kane, the eternal novice, who had somehow displeased the gods or the General and was destined to have his applications rejected year on year no matter how hard he tried. After five years of increasingly flowery commendations from various Brother-Captains, he was beginning to lose hope. Perhaps he could allow himself to fail, give in and let them apprentice him to a farmer or a blacksmith in need of a strong young lad to help in field or forge.

  It would give Bevan the satisfaction of having him kicked out, though. And even though Kane thought he could almost live with that, provided he never, ever saw Bevan again in his whole life, he couldn’t have lived with himself if he were to give less than his best to the order he loved. The Child Guard was his life, his destiny, all he had ever wanted since before he could remember. He knew he would make a great soldier, maybe one day even a great officer, if someone high in the lofty towers of the Citadel’s administration would only give him a chance.

  The afternoon had been basic schooling, the geography and history of the kingdom of Cruach, the four human principalities surrounding it which owed fealty to the king, and the great forest of Ciaradh where dwelt their hated enemy, the Sidhe. Kane had sat through the lesson so many times he could probably teach it himself, and the Brother-Tutor knew it, so after yet another dressing-down about his appearance Kane had been handed a broom and banished to sweep the corridors whilst the rest of the novices learned about the hierarchy of princes in the kingdom’s far-off cities, further away than most of them would ever travel.

  He didn’t mind sweeping, it wasn’t as bad as latrines or mucking out the stables, and it meant he didn’t have to sit with children ten years his junior, being alternatively chastised for not volunteering the answer or for knowing the answer too well. Dust didn’t talk back or tell him off, and his mind could be allowed to relax into boredom. He had worked diligently all afternoon, and when he was satisfied he had swept the area he had been assigned to a high standard, and the Nones bell had long since rang, he had put the broom away and gone to wait in an unobtrusive corner of the gardens for his friends.

  The brisk wind whipped at his hair, scouring the dust and sweat of the day from his face. The Citadel gardens were dubiously named, as there was nothing growing in them, useful or ornamental, save for a large expanse of lawn, broken by a few gravel paths and statues of great heroes, most long gone. Kane shuffled round to the lee of his favourite statue, the one of General Cathan, the living legend of the Citadel and Kane’s future commanding officer, or so he hoped.

  Cathan had started as everyone else in the Child Guard, as a novice, taken in before he could walk or talk. As he had grown he had risen like a comet, right up through the ranks until he held one of the highest posts in the Citadel. There were so many stories about him, most of them contradictory or heavily embellished, exchanged in whispers in the night or during the brief daily breaks the Child Guard were allowed. Kane knew enough to take most of the wilder details of the stories with a grain of salt, but Cathan had his own chapter in the order’s history books, and the true things recorded within and taught by rote were almost as unbelievable as the rumours.

  He had been the youngest Brother-Sergeant in the history of the order, taking command of the Ninth battalion, Third Company at the incredible age of fourteen. The historically unlucky Third company, under their new Brother-Sergeant, had been forged by blood and fire into the Dawn Reapers, a crack squad of the fiercest, bravest soldiers in the entire army. Their raids and exploits enlivened the history books the Child Guard were forced to study, their names were legendary and none more so than Cathan, the man who had made them into the knife-blade of the gods for over a century and a half. So legendary was he that upon promotion to General he had eschewed the traditional name associated with the position, not wishing to be another General Domitius in a long line of them, and had instead forged his own path under the name he had worn since his birth. Learning about Cathan and the Dawn Reapers had been one of Kane’s favourite things, and he had dreamed often of emulating the man.

  Of course, that was only the official record. The tales the novices, soldiers and sometimes Brother-Prefects and Brother-Sergeants had to share were at least as exciting. They said he could smell a Sidhe from a hundred paces, had been given the gift of a sixth sense by the gods which told him exactly where the foul creatures had made their lairs. They said one of his green eyes was glass, and the other had been taken out by a vengeful Sidhe matron, angry at the slaughter of her Changeling entourage. He walked with a cane, and they said that was because his glass eye had reflected a Sidhe curse back on its caster, leaving him paralysed briefly along the one side. Others said no, he’d been bitten on the leg by a Barghest, and had fought through the pain to bring back its master’s head. Still others said he had been on the verge of death, and a healwife had wrought a spell which took the strength in his leg in return for his life, or he had to wear a talisman with the hair of a nun and a Sidhe woven together, which would make him live forever.

  If it was to be forever, it didn’t look promising. Despite the Elixir Innocentiae, Cathan had not escaped the effects of his two hundred year lifespan, and he was rarely seen about the Citadel, preferring to stay in his quarters unless dire emergency threatened. When he did venture abroad, watched by awed children from afar, his hair was pure white, his face a mesh of scars which caused his beard to grow in odd directions. He limped heavily, and was usually accompanied by a younger soldier, in case his bad leg failed him completely.

  The statue, of course, had been put up when he was in his prime, and the barrel-chested, strong-chinned youth holding aloft the grotesque head of a Sidhe gazed out over the Citadel gardens with a defiant jut of the jaw. Kane couldn’t remember idolising anybody more.

  The relative quiet of the gardens was broken by gradually approaching voices, and Kane shifted his weight so he could see round the stone plinth as the novices spilled out, released from their lessons and drills and practices for the day. From now until the Vespers bell was a short break. Some of the younger novices played games with ball and hoop, while the older ones held foot races or pla
yed more violent contact sports, the better to toughen them up for battle.

  Behind the statue of St Ionacht and the Great Bear of Simina, locked in eternal, fierce combat, Eder emerged from the archway and gave him a friendly wave, Kane tore his eyes away from the spectacle of a dozen young novices tackling each other to gain possession of a small ball, and rounded the plinth, the wind blowing his hair in a dozen directions. A group of girls from the Sixth battalion passed by Eder, and Kane heard them audibly whispering as they passed, their eyes sliding over him as though he wasn’t even there.

  “I sometimes feel like they think I can’t hear them,” Eder sighed as Kane approached, and there was a melancholy about his voice.

  “Probably,” Kane shrugged. “Girls are idiots.”

  “They seem to think being branded is catching.”

  “I’d have caught it by now if it was,” Kane said, heading off Eder’s miserable train of thought before it got too far. “How was your day?”

  “Me? Oh, fine,” Eder said in a tone of voice that made it clear he was anything but. “Except I hit every bullseye they presented me with and they still gave the pewter arrow for the day to Daniel.”

  Kane pulled a face. “Maybe next time, you know they can’t give it to you every time.”

  “I’m not asking for every time, but even one time would be nice,” Eder sighed, then composed himself. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t complain, it’s likely Daniel’s form is better than mine. As they always say, bullseyes don’t matter if you don’t draw correctly.”