Some group of depraved cultists had killed Lucan, one of our fellow Scamps. The bastards killed a child.

The answer to 'why children?' is a bit technical, but the gist of it is that not all human souls are made equally, and aren't even equal throughout your lifespan. It should come as no surprise that the soul of a mage has more capacity to power soul magic than the soul of a mundane individual. Moreover, the soul of an 'unawakened' child - one who will gain magical ability but cannot yet feel their thaum - is greater still. Greater than they would be several decades later as a fully-trained master thaumaturge. Nobody's quite sure why, but the phenomenon is well-attested: the potential of the child is far more powerful than any deeds or skills they may secure in life.

It is equally well-known that soul magic has a serious weakness - the complexity of your spell is limited by the strength of your weakest soul sacrifice. Thus, if a ritual is too complicated for a necromancer to carry out with her own talent using the soul of an adult sacrifice, then adding a dozen more sacrifices won't do a bit of good. She must either study for decades to better cultivate her own ability… or find a child with unplumbed magical potential to overcome the power obstacle. And nowhere in the world is there a greater concentration of such children than Floria. Even if you ignore the nearly fifteen hundred children who are Scamps, about two-thirds of Floria's other children will eventually have enough thaum to operate magical artifices. And some of them will grow much, much stronger than that. But none more so than Scamps.

That is to say, a young student of the Collegium made the perfect sacrifice for twisted soul-mages up to no good.

Of course, you would have to be terminally stupid or utterly insane to kidnap and harm a student of the Collegium. And yet somebody had done just that.

"We can't let 'em get away with this," Po said for the fourth or fifth time, his eyes bleary with ears streaked down his cheeks.

"We won't," I assured him. His blade still in his fist, Aldo stared daggers into the bottom of the cart.

Mrs. Delina drove us back across the river and right back to the Collegium campus, where she urged us once again to tell our superiors what had happened. I suppose that, like most people, she was under the impression that our school was headed by a cabal of terrifying Shadows skulking around for the opportunity to ply their dark craft. But, for a Scamp, your primary contact with the Collegium is through your proctors, who are teenaged Greycloaks tasked with looking after you for ten hours per week in exchange for their continued education at the school. The Scamps' teachers are almost all outside people contracted for the job, and anybody above the level of proctors and Scamp teachers rarely interacts with you directly. It's not until you make Sneak that anybody of note begins to make your business their business.

"You go in and 'em them what happened," Mrs. Delina said. "Tell 'em that some bleak soul's s-sacrificed one of yours…" her voice choked up as she spat out the sentence.

Po just nodded. Sharp Lia ran her fingers along the sheaths of her knives, as if to convince herself that they were still there. I hadn't even known Lucan, but I felt numb. I'd been closer to danger and death before, but this somehow seemed more visceral, like something that could happen to me. This wasn't a caper in a spatback novel.

We went straight to Scamp Hall #3, which was where the Scamp administration, run by Mr. Vernik and his brother (also Mr. Vernik), was located. The doors had been opened for the evening, and so we waltzed right in, strolling past a bored-looking proctor as she flipped through the yellowed pages of an old mathematics text. She glanced up at us and was on her way to ignoring us when we started up the stairs.

"Hey!" she shouted. "That isn't your bunk!" In a literal flash, she was in front of us, blocking the hallway and glowering down. Apparently, she was perceptive enough to see that our emotional state was one of grief and not the terror a Scamp ought to feel at being challenged by an irate Greycloak. "What's wrong?" she asked.

"We need to tell somebody about what happened…" Sharp Lia mumbled.

"Everybody in administration is gone for the day. Whatever you have to say, you can say it to me, and I'll kick it up the flagpole…"

"How's a flagpole gonna help anything?" Aldo spat.

"It means she'll ask the big bosses," Mailyn said.

The proctor ushered us up the stairs and into the wooden chairs of the administration lobby. "So?"

So we told her about Lucan's disappearance, about how Mrs. Delani had helped us search for him with a divination, and about how we'd found the subterranean sacrifice site way out in the Dead Canton. She seemed to believe us and promised she'd forward the information to her superiors. But we still had to get back to our regular bunks for the evening.

"I hope she remembers his name…" Po grumbled.

"She didn't even write anything down," Sharp Lia said.

The five of us split for the evening, Po and Lia going to their bunk and Mailyn, Aldo, and I going to ours. And, for the first time in weeks, I didn't spend the evening hours before bedtime playing games or studying. I curled up on my bunk pad and tried to be quiet as I wept. Apparently, I wasn't all that successful…

"Aww… did someone hurt the Princess Manure's feelings?" Oltzen said, apparently mistaking my emotional display for weakness.

He and the rest of the tetrad no longer bullied me with any consistency, but they still got their licks in whenever they sensed anything approaching vulnerability. So it was best not to let them think I had any. Before I could fully process my feelings, I'd rolled off my bunk and surged toward him, rocketing myself right into the Shadelands, as I sometimes did when emotion overcame me. Oltzen stood within the ruddy radius of an evening glowglobe, which dropped me back out of the shadows a second later. The effect was probably pretty impressive: I'd just disappeared as I rolled off my bunk, dispersed into shadows, and popped back into being right next to the boy. Meanwhile, Mailyn had leapt off her bunk to support me and landed right next to my spot, little crackles of electricity and flutters of energy coursing across her skin.

"This ain't the night," she snarled. I just looked into Oltzen's eyes, glowering, my little fists balled up and part of me willing for him to try me. To try anything. I wasn't a great fighter, but a year as a Scamp had taught me enough. And I had a pretty good front kick.

"Okay… okay… sorry!" Oltzen said quickly, backing away.

"You alright, Vix?" Mailyn asked.

I shook my head 'no'. I couldn't see how anybody could be alright after what we'd seen. I'd spent my early years in Portogarra with servants and a loving family, spent them thinking that the world was a friendly place and that adults would generally look out for me and have my best interests in mind. The past year had been an extended lesson cementing that this was certainly not the case. Even so, the thought that somebody might kidnap me or my friends right off the street (or, well, right out of an herb-rich cemetery) and kill me horribly… that they'd done so to one of my fellow students…

"It's okay," Mailyn said. She ushered me up to her bunk and curled in next to me. It was the first time I'd slept with somebody else since I was too young to remember, but I slept like a baby and, somehow (and whatever it might say about me), my dreams were untroubled.

We didn't hear anything the next day or the day after that, and for all I knew, our pleas for help had been ignored. Aldo relayed our experience to Zev and Nate, who were both annoyed that we hadn't involved them in our plot - but, honestly, I'd barely been part of the search. The thing had been so spur-of-the-moment (even if it had been over the course of two days) that it hadn't even crossed my mind to include them. Mailyn and I were an inseparable pair; Zev and Nate were an inseparable pair; and Aldo hovered somewhere between us, binding the five of us together, but only as a constellation of mid-tier friends.

"Thought we were mates. We could've helped you," Zev insisted.

"Helped how?" Mailyn asked. "We needed Mrs. Delina to find the place, and by the time she cast her bones it was too late. Are either of you a diviner?"

"Um…" Zev said. "No, course we're not…"

"Hey, I might be," Nate said. "None of us knows what magic we'll be good at yet…"

"Well…" Zev said. He gestured to the three of us - two of whom semi-reliably expressed shadow magic and one of whom sparked and glowed whenever her emotions got the better of her.

"Okay, I guess some of us can guess it pretty good," Nate admitted. "Maybe I should try some divination magic, though? I should get myself some bones, right?"

While many Collegium Scamps express precocious magic, the percentage isn't all that high - maybe ten percent. While each and every recruit has some talent or trait that marks them as a potential talent, that usually amounts to demonstrating unusually high intelligence or the ability to light a glowglobe at age seven or eight (which is proof enough that the outer thaum is well on its way to developing). When a Scamp expresses a magical talent, that usually indicates which areas of magic they'll specialize in - though we're all encouraged to generalize at lease a bit.

Any great mage can learn any magical discipline well. Zev had some talents that suggested he might develop an expertise in kinesomancy, but it was also possible at that time that he simply had phenomenal reflexes and coordination. The same goes for somebody like Sharp Lia, able to grab tossed knives by the blade tips without so much as a scarred finger. But I digress.

"I read that you can't really learn magic until you can feel your outer thaum," Mailyn said. "Can you feel your outer thaum?"

Nate shrugged. "How would I know one way or the other?"

"You'd know," I said - though, obviously, I had no way of knowing. I was increasingly able to sense strong magic and control my trips into the Shadelands, but I couldn't manage anything more deliberate than lighting glowglobes. "Most kids can't until they're older than us."

We waited listlessly, sitting beneath the great tin awning near the old grain depot on the outskirts of the Foreign Canton. It was a huge building, as big as the largest warehouses down at the port, and teeming with people around its business end throughout the day. Sometimes, We would just wait around the area and watch laborers unloading sacks of grain from river barges and tossing them onto the great scales for sale - common grains were sold by ton, and so it took fifty twenty-kilo bags for the smallest sale, and most yields were much higher. Nearby, distributors and shop owners carted out smaller amounts for their own use at bakeries, restaurants, inns, and temples. Zev had a gig running prices and orders back and forth from the depot to the shops, so we sometimes met up there when our jobs ended in the late afternoon.

Aldo cleared his throat to get our attention. "So… I figure that, if the Collegium ain't going to get after the ones that did Lucan in, then we ought to. Otherwise, they'll keep taking kids…"

"How do we know that?" Zev asked. He passed out golden dinner loaves to the rest of us. One of the bakers had given him a parcel of rolls in lieu of monetary payment… a good deal for both parties, really.

"We don't know they'll keep taking kids," I said. "Maybe their ritual worked and they're a thousand kilometers away. But Mrs. Delina thinks it would probably be more obvious if they got it to work?"

"Mrs. Delina? That's the old bat that tossed bones for you?" Zev asked.

"She's not a bat, and there's nothing wrong with being old," I corrected him.

"Goff whumf?" Nate swallowed a mouthful of bread and tried again: "Got what to work?"

"Knee-crow mancy, probably," Mailyn said. "You know… magical stuff with dead bodies? Like shamblers but worse." Aldo nodded in agreement.

"Way worse, I bet," he added quickly.

"So what makes you think us kids can do anything about it anyway?" Zev asked. "Why don't you ask this Mrs. Delina? If she can toss bones, why can't she…"

"She's the old herbalist in those shops just north of the Bannered Temple… she knows a little magic," Aldo said. "Some pretty good magic even, maybe, but she ain't exactly a spellsword. It takes her a while. And she's old and probably isn't much good in a scrap. She told us to get help from the Collegium… and if the Collegium bosses ain't going to do squat, then I guess you're the help…"

"We could be heroes," Nate whispered to him.

"Okay," Zev said, "but we gotta… have to plan. This isn't the kind of thing you go into with half your wits."

And so we five Scamps planned on how we would find, infiltrate, and bring down a child-killing necromantic cult…

If you're a fan of spatback fiction like I am, I anticipate that you may be objecting about here: if a group of eight-year-olds gets into a convoluted circumstance, an adventure makes for great reading… but ninety-nine percent of the time, the issue could have been solved by talking to someone, anyone, in charge! There are literally dozens of Shadows who call the Shadow Canton home. These full graduates of the Collegium are trained in multiple forms of combat, thaumaturgy, spycraft, and much more. Surely, they would be more capable of handling this than a bunch of kids who can't even reliably use their talents yet? All too true.

However, consider that the Collegium's process is designed to make its charges very self-reliant and capable of working out of a pinch in a pinch. In many cases, as we'd discovered, there is no higher authority to go to. Our Greycloak proctors were only teenagers being given hands-on training in dealing with obstinate subordinates. The administrators above them were just that - the sort of bureaucrats you'd encounter at any academy and not terrifying Shadows who happened to have administrative jobs. And our relationship with the adults we worked for, like Mr. Hianchi and me, was very much quid pro quo. If Mrs. Delina couldn't help, we didn't know any adults well enough to ask… well…

"We could ask Rose," Mailyn said.

"Tell her about the shamblers!" Aldo added.

I nodded, having been thinking the same thing as Mailyn. Rose Argent, the beautiful Shadow who'd helped rescue us from Gionian slavers, third in command under the swashbuckling hero Herrick 'the Hawk' himself. Rose had told us to leave a message at the Collegium if we ever needed anything from her, and now we did. I wrote the letter, of course, since I had the best handwriting, but it was a group effort between the three of us (though, in the interests of full disclosure, I don't believe any of Aldo's suggestions made it into the final draft):

Dear Miss Rose Argent,

I don't know if you remember us but we were the three kids you helped rescue from the Gionian slave ship called Auspicio. Thanks so much for your help! Anyway we have been doing very well as Scamps! Only our friend Luca was not so lucky. When he was collecting herbs for Mrs. Delina (she buys herbs from us) Luca got taken by a cult of knee-crow mancers! That's the word Mrs. Delina used but I can't find it in the dictionary. They took him underground and killed him in a ritual! There was blood everywhere! Now we can't find anybody else to help. The proctor in Hall #3 listened to us but then nothing has happened. Please help us take care of the cult when you can. And by take care of we mean kill them. They have to pay for killing Lucan and keep the other Scamps like us safe. I know you're busy doing pirate private ear stuff but please help us if you can!

Thank you!

Your Friend,

Vix Altorelli

and Mailyn Watt and Aldo Carnoffi

…but we couldn't just wait for Rose to help us - that might take weeks or more. We all knew we had to do something now.