by Deck Davis
“Well, let’s get going,” said Witas. “We just need to talk our way past the front door, but I don’t think two expelled ex-students are going to get much of a welcome.”
“I know a better way to get in. We call it the Path of Returning, and it’s around the side of the academy. But we’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Leaving it a little late, aren’t we?”
“Nothing can get near the academy at night; close to the academy itself, they raise a mana field that stops anyone with permission from sneaking around. They pour all their mana into it at night and leave it off during the day, since it’s expensive to maintain. They aren’t worried about attack when it’s light and there are dozens of magic users walking around.”
“I saw a tavern half a mile back,” said Witas. “We can go there.”
87
The tavern was softly lit and it smelled of ale, manure, and sweat. A couple of guys were sitting at a table in the corner, and one kept glancing over his friend’s shoulder and at Jakub. He thought he did, anyway; right now, he’d have flinched at his own shadow.
“Evening lads,” said the barman, with a nod.
“We’ll take a room,” said Witas. “Two single beds. Two. I’m not sharing with this guy.”
“And some food and beer, please,” said Jakub.
They took a seat in another corner of the room, opposite the other men and away from the bar itself, where the barkeep was leaning on the counter with a book open in front of him. Across, the barkeep’s wife was sitting on a chair with a lute on her lap, picking at the strings with her long nails and humming a song.
“This is a quiet place,” said Witas.
“It’s between Dispolis and the academy. The academy doesn’t let traders deliver at night, and the only students who go out after dark are scouts.”
“What about our friends in the corner?”
“They’re holding hands under the table. See? This place has a reputation for keeping secrets.”
“The strangest thing happened when we got off the carriage,” said Witas. “I looked at the academy, and everything started flooding back. The place hasn’t changed, and you know what? It got me in the gut a little. Even though they kicked me out, I had some good times there. Like, how we all used to have every meal together in the common room. Thirty kids laughing and joking together.”
“I thought it’d miss it when I graduated. I thought that when I went on assignments I’d wish I was back in my room, but I don’t,” said Jakub.
“I don’t know about you, but they were right to kick me out,” said Witas. “Seeing it now, thinking back to the poor kids they take in, a place like that is worth protecting. I wasted my chance.”
The barkeeper loomed over them then, holding two glasses in one hand, and two plates of pie and mash on his other hand and forearm.
“Enjoy, lads. I brew the beer myself. I call this Hoppers Hop; I powder grasshoppers and use them for flavour.”
“Thanks,” said Jakub.
He tasted his beer, grimaced, but then relaxed when the alcohol hit his stomach and spread warmth through him.
Witas drank half of his in one gulp, and it was only while he drained the rest that Jakub saw a change in him; his eyes darkened a little, and this clued Jakub into the reality of how he was feeling.
The cleric was putting a brave face on it, but the guy had lost a damn arm. Sure, the divines had healed the wound, but he’d lost part of himself. Literally.
He was probably working on adrenaline now, and when this was all done, he’d drop.
“What’s the plan when we get to the academy?” said Witas.
“We’ll lay it all out to instructor Irvine. We have Studs and Trout in the suitcase, and we have names to give him.”
“It’s probably best that I sit that one out.”
“You’re going to come all the way out here and then not see your brother?”
“I want to…but on the other hand, I’d rather stick my cock in boiling mercury. Besides, now’s not the time for that. We’re here to warn the academy and get them on side, and me being there is only going to distract things.”
“You’re hiding.”
“The opposite, actually. I was expelled from the academy, then banished from the church. It’s the opposite of hiding when people force you out.”
“No,” said Jakub, “It’s hiding. When I was expelled, that was the first thing that came to mind – to go and hide in the Racken Hills. I know what hiding feels like. The academy treated us both like shit, and here we are coming back to help them because that’s the right choice to make. If we can do that for the academy, then you can face your own flesh and blood.”
“And if they don’t believe us?”
“Then in a day or two’s time Bendeldrick and his men will show up, and they’ll have no choice. Only then, they’d have lost the chance to prepare. If we get Irvine on side then he can inform the guardship; it’ll have weight when it comes from a respected academy instructor, rather than an expelled necromancer and A Black Cleric who are both wanted for murder.”
Witas stood up. “I’m gonna hit the sack. We’re leaving at first light?”
Jakub nodded. “You head up. I’ll have another drink.”
88
One drink turned to two as he listened to the barkeep’s wife play her lute and hum a tune. Soon, Jakub’s bladder was crying for release, so he went to the latrines outside. They were by the stables, and the barkeep’s mule was standing in one of the pens.
“Evening, boy,” said Jakub, and gave the animal a stroke as he threaded his way past hay bales and an upturned bathtub.
The latrine was a shed barely big enough to turn around in, with a hole in the ground that must have ran into a sewage duct underground.
Jakub started to relieve himself, when the wooden panel inches sway from his face began to change.
A face appeared in it; scaly, old, with narrow eyes and long, wispy hairs trailing from his nostrils and then twisted into decorate threads.
At first, he thought it was Kortho, because he’d never, ever seen another liguana apart from Kortho and his wife. This wasn’t him, though. This liguana didn’t have Kortho’s kind eyes.
He stopped relieving himself midstream and stepped out of the latrine, so that half of him was in the open with the draught blowing on him, half was inside.
“Young Jakub Russo, isn’t it?”
Wow – he even sounded like Kortho.
“That’s me. Who the hell are you?”
“A friend.”
“A friend wouldn’t have chosen right here, right now to appear. What is this, a spell?”
“You’re from the academy, no? Surely you’ve recognised the spell.”
Jakub shook his head.
“It is of no consequence,” said the liguana. “I only ask that you come inside and shut the door, so I may talk to you privately.”
Jakub looked around. There was no sign of anyone outside, and the only movements came from smoke rising from the tavern chimney, and the mule adjusting itself on its hay pile to get comfy.
He went into the shack. “Who are you?”
“My name is Bendeldrick.”
Jakub hadn’t been prepared for this, that Bendeldrick could cast a spell to talk to him, nor him actually wanting to.
“I’ve been hearing a lot about you,” Jakub said, trying not to show anything but a sense of cool.
“Many people have. I hear you have an item of mine?”
“An item?”
“The torturer. Studs Godwin; you have him in an artificed suitcase, do you not?”
How does he know that?
Jakub thought to keep a calm front, but it was getting harder. Bendeldrick knew things that he shouldn’t, and he could seemingly speak to Jakub whenever and wherever he liked.
He could only assume that until now, he hadn’t stirred Bendeldrick’s attention.
There was no point in lying about it, he guessed. You didn’t earn anyon
e’s respect by lying about something they could easily unmask you on.
“I can only assume that, given you chose to contact me like this,” said Jakub, “you’re too far away to have one of your men come grab me. That means you’re too late, Benny. Studs is going to help us now; he’s going to get the academy to listen.”
“Have you ever heard our side of things? A story has different ways of being told, and a man cannot decide if he only hears one. The academy trains you to close your mind to any way of thinking but theirs. All I ask is that you hear what I have to say.”
Jakub remembered what Studs had told him in the church of the Brightlight. About how the academy rejected otherwise good candidates for magical training just because they felt their minds would be a little too free for the academy’s tastes.
How the academy chose its students based on ones they felt they could hammer their ideals into.
He’d been turning it over in his head since leaving, because here was the part that made him cold – some of what Studs said made sense.
“Your academy accepts a dozen or so students each year,” said Bendeldrick. “But consider the fact that at any one time in the Queendom, ten times that number of children are out there with the magical proclivity inside them. Only, most aren’t chosen for training. Most are left alone with their gifts, where they either use them wrongly and cause damage to themselves or others, or the gifts wither inside them. But you wouldn’t know what it feels like for a gift to wither, would you?”
“I’ve been at the academy since I was eight,” said Jakub.
“A person’s magical proclivity isn’t just an abstract; yes, it might not be a physical thing, but it is like an organ inside them. When it withers, they feel its pain, only they feel it as a life long absence, a darkness inside them. The Queen commissioned a census once, you know. But the results were never published.”
“What about?”
“About increased rates in the number of children born with magical proclivity in each generation. On the other side, they studied the mortality rates among children under twelve years old, comparing those with magical potential and those without. Do you know what they found?”
“I can guess.”
“For those with magical potential but who had not been accepted to the academy for training and so had suffered their magic dying inside them, mortality and suicide rates were 30% higher.”
Jakub felt sick.
He thought about the children who’d lived in his camp back when he was with his parents. How many of them had the proclivity? One in five? More?
As far as he knew, he was the only one to be given academy-standard training. So, what had happened to the rest of them? Hosandra had turned out okay, but what about the others?
Even more ice spread through him now, because every word Bendrick spoke, the more it made sense.
At least he should hear him out, anyway.
“What do you want?” he said.
Bendeldrick grabbed a lamp from somewhere and put it next to him, so that the wooden panel he had projected himself on was lighter.
He held a square patch of some kind in his hand. It was pale but had dark lines drawn over it, forming a pattern.
The truth hit Jakub.
“That’s a glyphline.”
“I can offer you more power than the academy ever could have, even if they hadn’t cast you aside.”
“What do you want?” said Jakub, unable to take his eyes off the glyphline.
“I want Studs back.”
“Where are you?” said Jakub.
“A few hours ride away. I will give you directions.”
89 - Witas
Witas woke the next morning with thunderclouds in his head. He turned over on his bed and heard the tink of a glass bottle rolling across the floor.
“Urgh. Shouldn’t have brought a bottle of Firejack to bed with me.”
He sat up and willed the throbbing to subside. He put his arm out…only to hit nothing and fall over onto the floor and bang his skull.
Gods damn it. A one-armed Black Cleric.
Would he ever get used to it? It had only been a day since he’d lost his arm, and he knew that the divines hadn’t just healed the wound but had tweaked his mind too, they’d altered his thought patterns to force acceptance of his loss on him.
He knew how it worked, of course. He had been a white cleric himself once, and he knew the tricks the divines had in their healing.
In some ways, he wished Jakub hadn’t gotten the girl to heal him. It was an unnatural form of healing, after all; at least if he still felt the pain of his wound, his mind could understand his loss naturally. Now, it was like he’d never had the arm in the first place. It was like missing something that had never existed.
That brought on more unwanted feelings, like what was he going to do with his life?
No. That’s a question for when this is over.
He pushed himself to his feet using his left arm and walked over to Jakub’s bed, only to find it empty.
“Must be an early riser.”
He left the room and went downstairs and into the tavern, where the barkeeper was setting out stools.
“Have you seen my friend?” he said.
The barkeeper shrugged. “Part of my job is to not ask questions. I don’t keep a book of people’s comings and goings.”
Thinking about what Archie had said about his little secret entry way in his yard, Witas said, “Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”
He went outside and to the latrines by the stables, but he found that empty, too.
“Where the hell is he?”
He went back inside and checked their room again, and that was when he realized something; the suitcase was gone.
Jakub was gone, and he’d taken the suitcase with him.
Was it because Witas had drunk so much? They’d said they were getting an early start, that they’d go to the academy as soon as daylight broke.
Had Jakub tried to wake him, but Witas’s drunken sleep was so heavy that he couldn’t?
Whatever had happened, he felt sure of one thing; Jakub had gone to the academy, so Witas was going to have to go there, too. He was going to have to go and see his brother.
The strangest thing was that as nervous as it made him, as much as he wanted to turn back and head somewhere else – not Dispolis, but somewhere far away – a part of him wanted to do this.
A small piece inside him was, in a way, looking forward to seeing Ian.
It wasn’t as if he’d never thought about him over the years. They were brothers, after all. There were some bonds that people always said were unbreakable, and that of siblings was one of them.
Witas put on his coat, and felt the pathetic empty space in his right sleeve, and once again wished that none of this had ever happened, that he’d never answered Captain Blackrum’s request, that he’d never gone to see the pickpocket.
Too late for that now. He had to go to the academy.
And then, as he was ready to leave, he noticed something under Jakub’s bed; a leg poking out from underneath.
Wait…not just one leg – there were four.
90
Jakub followed the directions that Bendeldrick had given him, travelling for hours across the boundaries of the academy lands, until he found them.
Their camp was on the far side of the woods, which shielded it from view of the academy. He guessed that at some point today, they planned to use the cover of the forest to get as close to the academy as they could, and then they’d begin whatever it was they had planned.
An invasion? Storming the academy gates with their men wearing stolen glyphlines?
He didn’t know, but all he could think as he walked toward the tents pitched on the ground was, am I doing the right thing?
Two men rode out on horseback to meet him. They wore long-sleeve shirts, so Jakub couldn’t see if they had glyphlines grafted onto their skin.
“Are you Jakub?” asked one.
“Bendeldrick’s tent is this way.”
They led him through the camp. He saw men tending to their weapons and their horses, packing up tents, carrying armor.
Fires burned and the smell of meat drifted from spits above them. Sounds of chatter mixed with laughs, with songs, with the neighing of horses.
Only a few people even bothered to look at Jakub, and those that did paid him no more than a passing glance before carrying on with whatever they were doing.
By the time he reached Bendeldrick’s tent, which was the largest of them all, some of his nerves had left him. Doubt still nagged at him, and even now that he was here he still wasn’t sure that he was doing the right thing.
Could he do this?
Holding the artificed suitcase in his hand, he pushed back the tent flaps and stepped inside.
91
The tent was artificed. Inside, it was four times larger than it had appeared, and it was obvious that Bendeldrick travelled in comfort. It was warm, light, and well furnished, with a king-sized bed in the corner, and even a desk opposite it, piled high with books.
Bendeldrick was sitting at the desk and writing something, pinching a quill between his liguana claws.
Jakub only had Kortho to compare him to when it came to liguanas, but he could see that where Kortho had been sleight and had a build that many would have called an academic’s, Bendeldrick was toned, with athletic biceps and big shoulders.
Even so, he was old. Strands of his grey hair fell back over his scaly head. When he turned around, Jakub saw his long nostrils hairs that were platted and greased.
The men who led him here had gone now, and Jakub stayed by the entrance holding his suitcase.
It was then that a figure moved to the left of him, and a tall man stepped into view.
Jakub knew who it was instantly. He’d only seen him wearing a mask before, but his tall frame was unmistakable.
Two Last Rites, both of them with this man in them. He thought about Trout, about the pickpocket, about however many people throughout the queendom that these men had taken glyphlines from, and he felt sick just being here.