Chapter 9: Odd jobs, friends, and hidden enemies

I was in cloud nine, floating around as my feet walked me outside the classroom. I am in! I’m an Inker! I was dying to jump and celebrate, but I knew it had to wait. Right after being accepted, they told me to visit the same counter where I was given the admission token. I had to complete my registration and obtain the plate that accredited me as an Inker.

My eyes were lost on the multitude as I entered the building once again. “So?” Spare’s familiar voice scared me; it was coming right from my side, and I had no clue how it had got there.

My round eyes looked at him with martyrdom, primarily because of the scare but also to punish him. “You knew they would interview me, right?” The feeling had been nagging me for a while. If you did something so wrong, why bother talking with you? It was as easy as failing him and be done with it.

“So you passed!” His hand punched the air with fury while he exclaimed with joy. “What was it?”

“It?” I repeated, not sure what he was referring to. “Oh, the practical exam?” What else could it be? I explained every detail, taking a long time while describing the crystal dagger and the feelings I got from it. He repeatedly nodded as I explained the bloodthirst of that dagger. Then laughed when I told him how nervous I was when my name got called.

“If I had told you that the interview was the last step for admission, you might have been too relaxed. It was crucial that you defended your drawing.” He admitted, with some guilt visible on his face. I had to give it to him, it was not that far-fetched, and it made me be focused.

Still, I didn’t want to give in so easily. I sternly stared at him, only to burst into laughter a few seconds later. “I did it!” I jumped, still too in shock to get mad for a triviality like this. Some heads turned, showing their astonishment; how can a kid become an Inker? I’m sure all of them thought. Not only a kid, someone clearly of low status.

Spare laughed with me for a while, and then the both of us queued for the counter. There was barely anyone waiting, and in a few minutes, we were speaking to the same ginger I did before.

“Yo-You passed?” Her head, once again poking above the counter, looked at me full of surprise. Like everybody else, I guessed.

“I did,” I coldly said while nodding with my head. I was tired of all those stupefied or condescending looks. Choosing to keep quiet, I handed her the admission token.

She went somewhere further inside the room and shortly returned with a matte-polished plate hanging from a metal string. She spoke to me like I was a kid, which filled me with hostility. Maybe I looked the age, but my mind was far beyond it; hell, I had just passed the admission exam! I refuse to cite her words, so instead, I’ll sum up what she said. The plate was inscribed with my name and my rank, which at the moment was Ga’darar. It was a token of our current ability and limited the jobs we could opt for.

For instance, Ga’darar could only carve simple objects, and rarely would it be on actual skin. Starting at Ga’sarar, one stopped being considered a novice and entered the apprentice level. You would have to demonstrate the ability to alter the object. Fixing defects, removing scratches, adding a few details, nothing too extraordinary. Most of them I could already do.

Ga’lar and above required expertise with multiple tools and absolute control over your mind. The first job I witnessed Spare do would be considered of this rank. Then we had Ga’far, strong knowledge of glyphs and sigils. Only if you could imbue new properties to an object through those strange symbols would you obtain this rank.

And finally, Ga’ar, Spare’s rank, I deduced. Inkers who mastered the use of formations and were capable of representing abstract concepts would reach this rank. According to Ovile, the ginger at the desk, only a few have ever managed to ascend so far. Her eyes sparkled as she looked at Spare while saying that. It seems my teacher is an icon in this community. Of course she read that letter multiple times, I remembered. She must have been stunned by its author’s name.

“What do they mean?” I asked, finding it strange the names were so closely similar to my Drak’gath.

Ovile shrugged her shoulders; she didn’t have any clue what the names meant. But Spare anxiously moved his feet, tapping the ground a few times. It took him a while. Maybe he was meditating on whether he should keep the information secret.

“He who starts. He who thinks. He who draws. He who speaks. He who captures.” His monotone voice listed the ranks one by one, devoid of emotion. Just like you would read the shopping list to your kid.

Advancing a rank had two requirements, explained Ovile after recovering from the shock. First, you had to complete enough jobs of your current rank to prove you had contributed to the association. Evidently, it couldn’t be another way; the association took a cut of every job. Then, you would have to pass another exam to demonstrate you fulfilled the requirements.

“He would like to take some jobs,” Spare said when she ended the explanation.

“Of course,” she replied while taking a ring binder from under the desk. “All but Ga’ar jobs are here.” He handed the binder to Spare. “Up to the first separator, you can take a maximum of three requests at once.” Spare was holding the binder at my height, making it easier for me to follow. I opened it on the first page and started reading.

Inscribe my cat’s plate, 4 drops of graphite black.

Fix the sign on Yural’s Inn, 5 drops of porpoise black.

Copy an exemplar of Imbuing Ink, 1 shot of fossil black.

Most works provided their own Ink, aside from the reward, but one had to be careful. You never know what desperate people might want to pull out. Also, most works on the Ga’darar rank were tedious. It was a necessary evil, of course, but they were so banal that spending a few weeks doing them could very well suck the life out of me.

“Spare...” I timidly said, “How much is a drop? And a shot?” It was hard to admit, but I had absolutely no clue about the currency measures.

“Mmh,” he meditated for a brief moment. “Ovile, could you lend us a measuring cup?”

She came back a few seconds later with a cup not taller than my hand, entirely made of glass and with several markings along its side. The first ten marks were a hair’s width apart. A bold line next to the tenth tick read ‘1 shot’. I counted 15 of those bolder lines until I reached the ‘1 small flask’ mark. In other words, anything less than 1 shot was a meaningless quantity.

I sighed, too aware of how badly paid all those jobs were; not only was the quantity ridiculous, the quality was of the lowest grade. I kept reading, occasionally going back, while Ovile attended other people.

“What do you think about this one?” I asked Spare, while pointing to the open file.

“Carve a hammer on my torso, 2 shots,” he read back. “The pay is lacking, but you need the experience.” He nodded.

I picked one more, writing some pamphlets for the local church for 8 drops. Spare handed back the binder and the two files I had chosen, and we left. The garden was mostly empty at this point, and only those inside the building waiting for their turn reminded. My eyes crossed with my aggressor’s eyes, and Spared seemed to notice it.

“He tried to force me out of the association...” I whispered, low enough so that only him heard. “Someone stopped him, but he was about to kick my ribs after pushing me to the floor.” It was hard to say; the voice ran aground on my throat.

“You shouldn’t worry about him. Those kinds of enemies are easily fended off.” I was caught off-guard by his reply; my head turned to strangely stare at him. “You should be worried about the bright ones, the nobles that plot behind your back. You are powerless against them, and unlike that moronic kid, they won’t leave a trail of evidence behind.”

“Is there anything I can do?” I rushedly said, almost cutting him before he finished.

“Yes, hide in the sewers!” He bitterly laughed at his own misfortune.

We made our way to the inn, chatting about the exam’s questions and gossiping about its attendees. Once we got there, I decided to do nothing and take the rest of the day off. I had a few errands to run, but they weren’t by any means urgent. The pamphlets had to be written by tomorrow night, so I still had a whole day, and the tattoo could wait for three more days. I didn’t intend to put it off until the last moment, but I was truly exhausted from the exam’s mental pressure.

The following months were like the calm before the storm. Everything worked out on the first try; I completed both jobs and then took one after another, to the point that I always had one in store. I carried a small flask that Spare had given me, and by this point, it was almost full. Its color, a mixture of a handful of black tones, was something close to soot black. Either way, it was low quality, and it had become my go-to Ink for practice.

Out of all the jobs I did, carving a cow’s skin must have been the weirdest. The owner wanted to mark the cow and make it clear it was his, but loathed the traditional method of using hot metal. Instead, he wanted to tattoo the cow with his personal seal. Could a cow invoke the Ink? I asked Spare, but all he could say was that there hadn’t been any cases of animals materializing Ink. In the end, after battling with the beast to make it stand in a place and running on its trail several times, I managed to carve a semi-decent drawing.

I had made of Ovile my acquaintance and learned that she didn’t mean to treat me as a child. It was just her way of speaking. She always was sweet, absolutely never failed to greet me with a smile, and without fail asked me for my adventures and jobs. I liked to think of her as my friend, but I wasn’t sure if she was just doing her job.

Back at the inn, I also met the neighbors’ kid. He was of my age, and as any healthy kid should, enjoyed playing in the open. I couldn’t discuss with him anything related to Ink, as I discovered soon after trying it. His blank face and winking eyes told me he was utterly oblivious to whatever I tried to say. So, instead, I acted like a youngster for once in my life. I pursued other kids and played chase with them. I laughed and rejoiced. Those were happy times.

I didn’t leave my studies behind. Spare said that I could easily ascend to Ga’lar, the third rank, with a few more practice months. My drawings with two tools improved by leaps and bounds, I could switch between the two without thinking, but I still left visible spots where I did so, and the final drawing resented.

As Spare often reminded me, I had a natural inclination to hold all kinds of knowledge and an unnatural sixth sense to feel the objects’ properties. I started learning the written language of glyphs, that time for real. Unlike my mother language, which is usually learned from the ground up, starting with grammar and simple constructions, glyphs, or at least those taught by Old and Modern Glyphs, revolved around understanding the symbols’ root.

One vertical, completely straight stick at the center of a glyph had the opposite meaning as the same stick being drawn horizontally. For example, cold and hot were written the same but inverting the root. The language wasn’t thought for complex expressions; on the contrary, its essence lay in compressing the information into single glyphs. Extreme cold could be derived from cold by adding a series of spirals or squares, depending on the emphasis you wanted to make.

At Spare’s request, I applied for the advancement exam and succeeded at repairing a rusty sword. My right arm now sported a sharpened short blade with golden incrustations on its ridge. I made sure to adjust the handle to my hand’s size and balanced the weight and length to yield it in one hand. There was no interview, and the theoretical exam was a joke once again.

My fast rise, according to Ovile, had gathered the attention of a few professors and Inkers. The first group wanted me to attend their classes, and I had to politely decline their offers. In case you didn’t guess it already, they didn’t exactly like that, and they made me know it by threatening to be stricter on my next exam.

The latter was terrible news. Most jobs for a Ga’sarar consisted of tattooing objects, and sometimes the requester was a noble. Influences and contacts all played against me. Being Spare’s apprentice was not enough, and the Baril’s name didn’t protect me at all. I had to put up with insults, looks of disgust, and major attitudes. On three occasions, they refused my services upon seeing me, and I had to go back to the association with empty hands. It’s not like that had any negative impact on me; quite the opposite, I received half the commission they had paid in advance, and they would have to pay again to have the job done. But still, it left a bitter taste.

The worst part was that I could do nothing about it. I didn’t know who was behind pulling the threads, and truth be told, even if I knew, the result would have been the same. Ovile helped me find jobs that didn’t involve nobles, or that at least involved neutral factions that wouldn’t mind having me as the Inker.

One way or another, my life was on the right track. Or so I thought, the storm was about to discharge, and it wouldn’t leave a single stone unturned.