by Deck Davis
“On the fence? You talked Lolo around on expelling the kid.”
“What happens in the inquiry room, stays in the inquiry room,” said Henwright.
“We were all on the same page, right? I mean, you agreed with what I said?”
“We all voted for expulsion.”
“And how’d you think he took it?”
“Better than you’d expect. Especially when I let him believe at least one of us wanted him to stay. It felt right to throw him a rope.”
“Night, Henny. Don’t bottle it up; you know where my room is.”
“Good luck with your poker game. Lolo blinks when she’s bragging; that’s her tell.”
When Henwright got back to his room, he unwound his scarf from his neck and put it with the rest of his collection; fifty two, one for each week of the year, every color and every material a scarf-connoisseur could dream of. Cashmere, velvet, silk, wool. A scarf for every mood.
He lit the fire and turned on each lamp, despite knowing that if Irvine walked by and saw the light glowing under his door, he’d knock on it and remind him about the academy’s heating bill.
Screw academy funds. With Irvine at his poker game, Henwright wanted light and warmth. He cut a sliver of cheese and set it out for Grunder, his pet mouse.
“Come on, Grunder. Before I scoff the lot.”
With his lights on and his mouse chewing on cheddar, there was nothing to do but wait. He wished he actually could do what he’d told Irvine he was doing; relax with cheddar and a book, but he couldn’t concentrate on the story. Instead, he just paced and paced around his room.
Finally, a voice spoke from his right.
A painting on his wall, which had shown a summer’s day in one of Disopolis’ maze alleyways, transformed. The passersby disappeared, a café became a splodge of color, until it changed into something else.
A figure stared back at him from the frame. Only a candle behind him gave illumination, and his hood made it impossible to see his face.
Henwright had always believed in using art as a means to use color to instill a mood on someone. If this man were art, and not a real person staring back through an artificed portrait frame, Henwright’s mood would have turned cold.
“You promised me news,” said the man.
“Is this the end?” asked Henwright.
“You have decades ahead of you, Henwright, as long as you cut down on the claret and dairy.”
“I mean, should I expect to see your face on my walls again? No more threats? No more visits?”
The man lifted a book into the portrait frame. It was thicker than a bard’s ballad of epics, and it gave off a feeling of age. Henwright could almost smell the mana coming off it. Knowing what was within its pages sent equal amounts curiosity and revulsion through him.
“You can put that away. I don’t need to see,” he said.
The man opened the book. He flicked from page to page, and with every turn of paper Henwright felt sicker.
There was a tattoo on every one; real skin cut from a person’s arm and the stuck in this book. The man showed Henwright each sample, drawing his attention to his favorites with the pride of a demented stamp collector.
“See this?” he said. “A precious glyphline. I had to go to the far Galapine Isles to find that one. The girl screamed when we took it from her. Have you ever heard a person scream?”
“Of course.”
“I mean really scream,” he said. “Not like your students running across the playground playing games, but a person screaming because it is the only way to drown out the pain.”
“We’re done here,” said Henwright. “Finished. And now, I don’t need to listen to your shit.”
“Then you have sent me…”
“A necromancer. Three glyphlines tattooed on his arm; Soul Harvest, Resurrection, and Death Bind. I gave him a mana-sealed envelope, so you should be able to track him when he gets closer to Dispolis.”
“Is there anyone I should worry about?”
“He hasn’t seen his family in years, and I doubt they’d recognize him now anyway. He has few friends in the academy.”
“You are wasted as a teacher,” said the man.
Henwright couldn’t take his eyes off the book. The open page showed a flap of skin torn from an arm. The skin was brown, and it had a tattoo of blue ink in the shape of a pentagram.
Once, that would have been on someone’s arm. A magic user, somebody who had trained with their magic enough to earn a tattoo. And now…
He pushed the cheese away from him. It fell on the floor and then Grunder was on it, nibbling at the edges.
“Something wrong?”
“You know what’s wrong, you water-color bastard,” said Henwright. “You think you’re so mysterious, but there’s nothing I can’t find in the academy library. The magic in glyphline tattoos; it should drain out when the skin is cut away, and I always wondered how you stopped that happening. Well, it didn’t take me long to find out.”
“Ingenious, isn’t it?”
“You should be strapped up in a straitjacket in the thickest padded cell ever made. People like you, I don’t know how you come to be like that. What was it? Were you mana drenched? Is it mental illness from childhood?”
“You think that you know me?” said the man. “Instructor Henwright, you were probably born in a manor with a sprawling garden and butlers and maids. I bet you learned to walk on satin carpets, with diamond chandeliers hanging above your head. You and your books. Does reading about a storm give you the same experience as a man who is drenched, cold, his skin red and numb?”
“I don’t need to be a murderer myself to know that murder is wrong. I don’t need to drink poison to know it will kill me. You use pain-”
“Pain as a conductor, yes. People have tried everything, haven’t they? Drinking the blood of one who is magically endowed. Drinking their saliva, their seed, tasting their flesh. We all know about those kinds of religions, don’t we? Ones not possible without necromancy.”
“The academy doesn’t condone Imbibism.”
“Nevertheless, my technique is no different, except in its effectiveness. Magic flows freely through the wires of agony; it is simply a matter of causing enough pain to draw the magic out completely. While hucksters travel town to town selling their magic trinkets and promising to piss out rainbows, none can offer the same as I; real tattoos of spellcasting, taken from those with real powers.”
“Why not start selling hunter’s eyeballs and sculptor’s fingers while you’re at it?”
“But any man with enough determination can learn the skills of a hunter,” he said. “Isn’t that right? Any person, no matter their background, can learn to sculpt. Magic offers no such promise, does it? No amount of ambition or practice will let a child use mana if they aren’t born with it. Does that seem fair? Tell me, in your academy library, is there a single book that speaks to this? A single scrap of paper where your instructors have researched the matter or why some are born with this talent, with the world open to them?”
“So that’s what this is about,” said Henwright. “Not money…that’s just a bullshit cover. You don’t really care about selling the glyphlines; you’re just having a tantrum because you weren’t born with the gift.”
“Gift. Such an apt choice. A gift is given, isn’t it? It isn’t earned.”
“I didn’t always need glasses, you know” said Henwright. “Too many hours reading by candlelight. My poor eyesight is a testament to my hard work. Look around. I live in an academy bedroom fifty feet away from a bunch of teenagers, and my only companion is a mouse. Tell me, do you think I was just given all the knowledge that I have?”
“I think what you have now could disappear so easily, Henwright.”
“No. This is over tonight. One more – that’s what you needed. A necromancer with the three glyphlines on his arm. He’s on his way to you, so for god’s sake, remove the damn curse.”
Henwright took off his glove
and glanced at his fingers; long, wrinkled, capped by nails that never stayed short no matter how much he clipped them. While his skin usually had a pink flush, his right hand was oil-black.
It was a hand that had touched the Blacktydes, the Greylands’ uglier cousin, filled with a corruption that deadened everything it touched.
“It’s spreading to your wrist,” said the man.
“All the better that you’re going to remove it for me.”
“A smaller man than me would get offended by your tone. A man can divide his mind, you know. See the good, whilst doing the bad. Remember how I honored my word. For what it’s worth, Henwright, you are a good man.”
“I was. Before this.”
“When you wake tomorrow, the curse will have begun its retreat.”
The colors in the painting faded, returning back to the scene of the Disopolis alleyways. Henwright looked at the crowd and wished he could blend into them, to become part of the painting like his tormentor had, and just disappear into it.
The novice would be walking down a street like that soon. Perhaps the very same one. And like in the painting, the man would loom large, transforming the streets into a nightmare for him.
10
After leaving the academy, Jakub reached what they called the Well of the Damned, which was really a giant sinkhole a few miles away from the academy itself.
Students used to say it led straight down into the Blacktyde, one of several places a person could go in the afterlife when after their time in the Greylands was up and their resurrection window was closed.
Jakub knew the Blacktyde was real, but he didn’t believe a sinkhole near the academy was an entrance to it. Even so, he was just about to throw a stone into it for luck – some students used coins but the academy’s policy of not being wasteful was written deep inside Jakub – when he heard horses.
Mason D’Angelt, the master warlock, led two warlock novices on horseback. Mason was built like a guy who’d lifted boulders for fun all his life. His cape was made of richer material than the robes that the academy issued its instructors, and it was fastened on his chest by a brooch, from which smoke drifted. That was probably an artificed effect; a lot of the older generation loved little fancies like that.
His hair was spiked up and it was as immaculately groomed as his beard, but he was losing his battle with age, evidenced by a bald patch on his crown.
Mason was a cult figure around the academy, and as much as Jakub wanted to pretend that seeing him was nothing special, nothing to get fussed about, he found he was standing up straighter.
Jakub only knew one of the novice warlocks riding with Mason; it was Bendie, a guy his age who’d always acted like he hated Jakub, presumably because of Jakub and Abbie’s relationship.
The other guy was called Norris something, but Jakub had only seen him when they passed each other in the academy corridors from time to time.
“Hey, you,” said Mason. “Big ears.”
“Big ears?” said Jakub.
“You’re a long way from classes, son.”
“I was expelled,” said Jakub.
Bendie laughed, then covered his mouth.
Glad to see you’ve taken academy teachings of respect on board, thought Jakub.
“I heard that three stick-up-their-arse necromancers had kicked someone out,” said Mason. “That was you? Where are you headed?”
“Dispolis for a start,” said Jakub.
“A big city. Easy to get lost in.”
“I’ve been before,” said Jakub. “How’s Abbie?”
“Abbie Marsh? You know her?”
“He stalked her,” said Bendie.
Jakub didn’t feel like relaying his entire relationship history to Mason, and especially not in front of novices Bendie and Norris.
“We were friends,” he said. “I heard she was killed in the field, and they had to take her to the resurrection chambers. What happened?”
“Sorry, novice. All instructors were sworn to silence on that one.”
Sworn to silence? That was a new one for Jakub; when recruits died in the field and were brought back, the academy usually used it as an opportunity to brag about what a miracle their necromancy department was, in an attempt to get more funding.
So, for every instructor to be banned from talking about it meant that something unusual had happened.
“Dispolis will empty your purse quicker than a thirty-fingered pickpocket,” said Mason. “Need some loot to get you started?”
“Maybe; what do you need me to do?”
“A quarter of a mile north, a bunch of brigands have set up camp. They’ve been robbing folks on the Royal Road and Merchants Pass, always moving on before the guardsmen show. Now that they’ve camped in academy grounds, we’re within our rights to ask them to move. I intend to be quite forceful.”
“Yeah, we’re gonna kill them,” said the other warlock, a lanky boy with a shaved head.
“That was what I implied,” said Mason. “I try and teach you boys some subtlety, but your heads are too damn porous. What do you say, novice? It’s the least I can do if old Henwright and Irvine the tight-arse have screwed you over.”
Jakub did need the loot, and although any fight could be dangerous, it would surely be easier with a master warlock on his side. What was there to lose?
With no sure way of earning gold in the future, he’d have to take every chance he got.
“What’s the plan?” he said.
“The brigands are mean bastards if you listen to the stories,” said Mason, “Until they meet someone meaner. They’ve been known to move on when you wave your cock and they see yours is bigger. All we want to do is get them off academy boundaries. If we growl enough, we won’t have to dig any graves tonight.”
“And the loot you promised me? There won’t be any if we let them live.”
“If that happens I’ll give you something of my own.”
“Forget him, Mason,” said Bendie. “They banished him because he messed up his first assignment.”
“I heard he’s the worst novice ever to graduate,” said Norris.
Jakub had expected rumors about his expulsion to spread, but not this quickly.
He wasn’t going to have a long career with the academy and he wasn’t going to earn prestige through his missions, but at the very least he wouldn’t leave behind a legacy of being the worst novice to graduate.
“Let’s go drive these bastards away,” he said.
“Try and keep up,” said Bendie.
The warlocks left on their horses, while Jakub walked behind. They kept to the Royal Road, a path that joined not just Dispolis and the academy together, but also connected every other fortress and city within five hundred miles. They followed this a few minutes before heading into shrubland that belonged to the academy by title, but was rarely used.
Being so close to the Royal Road yet with patches of overgrowth, hilly bobbles, and bushes, it was the perfect place for brigands to wait in ambush, ready to pounce of a road traveler.
Jakub caught up to Mason and the others, who’d stopped.
“It’s important the academy shows its balls when brigands wander into our boundaries,” said Mason.
What is it with this guy and cocks and balls?
“The academy has a list of suppliers bigger than Prince Hogarth’s brothel tab,” said Mason. “The alchemists need their frogs eggs and cinnamon and crap like that, and you necros need fresh corpses . If we let trades get ambushed by a bunch of dirty brigands while they’re travelling here, the academy will be less popular than a leper colony.”
It was a strange feeling for Jakub now; the academy had cast him away, but he still cared for it. It was the academy that had saved him from his cannibal family, after all.
Even so, he owed them nothing because they’d expelled him without a fair hearing.
“I’m helping for the loot. I couldn’t care less about their supplies.”
“That kind of mercenary attitude
will serve you well in Dispolis,” said Mason.
“Mercenary? Don’t make me laugh,” said Bendie.
Jakub wanted to knock the smug little bastard from his horse, but he kept his cool.
They carried on a further over the shrubbery, going slower this time. Jakub kept a look out for signs of brigands, but he didn’t see any.
Mason stopped ahead of him, five hundred meters from the road where the bushes were so tall that they formed a natural wall, and a hill rose up twenty feet, towering above.
Jakub hurried to catch up with the three warlocks again, wondering if they’d found the remnants of a camp, and if it was abandoned and the brigands had moved on already.
That’d be annoying; he wouldn’t be able to show his skills to stop people like Bendie talking shit about him, and he wouldn’t be able to earn any loot.
As he had the thought, he noticed figures on the ground. He caught up to Mason and the others.
“Here are our bandits,” said Mason, nodding at the corpses on the ground.
There were five of them; three men and two women. They looked like they’d been torn apart.
“What happened?” said Bendie.
“Time for you to shine, necromancer. Find out what these poor bastards saw,” said Mason.
He must have been talking about Last Rites, a spell that would let Jakub see the last few minutes of a person’s life.
“They made me give back my soul necklace,” said Jakub. “I can’t cast anything.”
“Gods, it gets better and better,” said Bendie.
“Lad, if you don’t shut that bumhole on your face, I’ll have a mage seal it shut. Never talk shite about someone; you never know when you’ll need them,” said Mason.
“Do you want to try tracking whatever did this?” said Jakub.
“Better call in the hunters. They’ll-”
Mason didn’t have time to finish the sentence, before the ground began to move around them.
Mud burst up as if something was tearing out of the ground, but rather than something appearing from underneath it, the mud itself churned while it floated, rising up and splattering together mid-air.