Chapter 21

THE ACADEMY

Some people will go through life complaining about everything under the sun and moons. They complain of ash on dark days and complain it’s too bright on clear mornings. Give them a million shells and they’d still complain about the trouble of storing them. Maybe you know the type. Maybe you’re one of them…

This kitchen worker was one of these people, and by the Watcher, did he commit to that role.

‘And I’m telling you, those cellars were all stocked backwards and upside down. These northerners don’t know their area from their elbow,’ I listened to him blabber at a bewildered fruit merchant.

Before the man could say anything, the worker was yammering on.

‘These don’t like ripe. What is it with the yampears these past months? Not even good for compost.’

‘I—‘

‘All those pirates, I bet, pushing up prices on every ship. And guess who hasn’t done anything about it? Venerance,’ he whispered. ‘Seas wash me away.’

I wished they bloody would.

Flinging his shells at the merchant, the man moved on to find more people to bother. I kept my distance and pretended to peruse the night market while he went about his errands. In the end, he decided to linger at a hole in a marble wall that sold ales in stout parchment tankards.

‘If they have the cheek to send me out at this hour, I’m having a drink, I tell you! You won’t believe what I’ve suffered today, Yazaf,’ I heard him practically yell at the barkeep. Several drinkers lingering nearby made themselves scarce.

The small wagon, now heavy with all manner of foods I would have gladly pilfered for my kitchen – something I would never bore of saying – was left by the side of the quiet street. Skinny trees that Malyka had called palms made archways overhead. The backside of the market was poorly lit, even for the upper city.

I lingered by the beast that pulled the wagon. The thing was some kind of bird, but taller than I was and with heavyset legs and wings so small it looked like two napkins pinned to its sides. Behind its wire muzzle was a red hooked beak that looked to be very capable of tearing a man in half. Burned umber and scarlet feathers hung from beneath its chin like a beard, and they shivered as I walked a sly circle around the creature. It leaned its thick neck out to sniff at me and I was momentarily transfixed by its three red eyes. Hunter’s eyes.

The kitchen worker was still driving the barkeep dead with his stories. ‘Two cloves, not twenty! Where did the zero came from? I’ll tell you who, Yazaf. It was that new cook. I know she’s winding me up on purpose. I don’t know what poor excuse from a kitchen or who hired her, but that fool is not up to the standards of the Academy of the Prophesied, I assure you!’

Stifling a yawn, I waited in the shadows by the wagon. The bird squawked once in alarm but was immediately hushed by the worker.

Working quickly, I shifted sacks of vegetables and glass jars aside to make a small hole that I could burrow into and cover up again. The space was cramped and stunk of vinegar, but I decided it was better than trying to talk my way past a dozen guards in a stolen and bloodied uniform.

Aside from the dust and stink that was doing a fine job of tickling my nose, I was forced to endure the endless yammering. It grew so interminably odious that I thought twice about my plan. Letting the muzzle off the bird and letting him wreak havoc was starting to sound far more rewarding than lurking like an overgrown potato.

‘How much? These prices are getting awful, Yazaf. Do I look like a merchant or a pious or a baron to you?’

I felt bad for this Yazaf. He barely squeezed in a, ‘No’ before the kitchen worker went off on a rant about the prices of beer. From the tiny pinprick of a view I had between two giant onions, I watched the worker escape without paying. He gave Yazaf a barrage of complaints and unwanted advice instead, not halting even once he was on the wagon and poking the bird onwards.

‘And that’s the problem with this city!’ the worker yelled. ‘Get moving, you lazy paracrax.’

The planks of the wagon rattled against my ribs, jostling me.

The worker found even more to moan about on the road, namely pedestrians and fellow wagons. Either they went to slow, too fast, were two wide, in the way, or just driven by somebody that was a complete idiot. The worker had many reasons, and he yelled them all as he guided the giant bird.

It took me an interminable hour curled up in that stinking grave of vegetables to reach the Academy.

‘You’ve been gone a while, Nolvoto. You were told to be quick.’

Finally, the complainer had a name.

‘Because it’s night, Captain. Half the markets are closed. Do you know how hard it is to find Esferin hakar at this time of evening? I can’t hurry any faster.’

Hands came to poke at the produce. I held my breath. The sack started to lift from me.

‘You be careful!’ Nolvoto snapped. ‘I put the yampears on top for a reason. Even a touch bruises them, never mind your dirty great clanking hands.’

With a sigh, the prosecutor gave up. ‘Away with you. Back to work.’

‘I’m at work, curse it.’

The wagon jolted. The light died around me. The noise of work grew louder.

‘Ho, Nolvoto!’ came a voice. ‘Master wants to see you!’

‘When does he not?’

‘Stable that paracrax in the cellars and come up sharpish.’

I tensed when the wagon came to a stop. It was leaned at an angle as the harness came off the bird. An onion skittered across the floor, revealing half my face.

‘Watcher damn it all!’ exclaimed Nolvoto. I could spy him wrestling the bird into a stall in an empty row. Curious beaked faces poked out over the other doors.

With all kinds of huffing and grumbling, Nolvoto hurried to save the onion. I waited, hand on my fish-knife, but he was so bothered by his summons he didn’t notice the eyeball glaring at him.

‘Nolvoto!’ echoed a voice.

‘Twats. The whole lot of them,’ he cursed while he scurried up the ramp and slammed the door behind him.

Heaving the sacks off me, I stood hunched in the half-light of a cellar. Shelves and tables abounded with vegetables, loaves, and jars. Haunches of salted meat hung from the ceiling. Stacked barrels fortified the walls. Purple songbirds no bigger than my thumb crowded a wicker cage. They cheeped nervously as I tiptoed past them. My stomach rumbled at the sight and smell of the ingredients around me. I rammed some cave mushrooms into my mouth to keep it quiet. Maybe a crumb of cheese, too and a slice of salt skink. And a wedge of pie that sat in a chilled cupboard. I’ll tell you a truth of the gutters: never wrinkle your nose at free food.

To the chirruping of the birds both tiny and monstrous, light spilled into the room. I’d heard the footsteps at the last moment, and hidden myself behind a crate of melons. The scuffing feet came around me. I saw a scrawny fellow with a white wooden cap and terrible posture trying to balance a large bowl of slop in his hands. It looked foul to me, but the paracrax birds looked extremely excited. As the worker began pouring it into troughs the birds could stick their muzzled heads under, I reached for a melon and trod the straw-scattered floor with precision and absolute silence. I had seen fighters knocked unconscious in the battlerings and in street brawls in Canarva, but I’d never tried to do it myself. Couldn’t have been that difficult, right? All you needed was a willing or oblivious volunteer and something heavy.

With both hands, I hurled the heavy melon over my head. It flew only a short distance, but far enough to smash against the man’s head and drive his face into a stable door. Just as I had hoped, he crumpled into a heap. Success.

But while I started uncoiling a rope, I heard a groan come from the aforementioned heap.

‘What in the holy fuck! Is this… is this melon?’ the scrawny man said, trying to get up on shaking hands.

I dived on him, ramming his head against the door again.

‘Ow! What are you trying to do to me!’

Why this wasn’t working, I had no idea. This was not how it happened in the stories and songs.

In a panic, I thwacked him on the jaw, seized a length of rope, and wound it about his face until all that poked through was a nose and two wide eyes. He made quite the noise even through his bindings.

‘What I’m doing is none of your business, you bizarrely thick-skulled man.’

‘Mmmmggg!’

Once I’d relieved him of his tabard and shoes, I dragged him into the nearest corner and covered him in straw from the paracrax pens. The broken melon was already being seen to by the hungry birds. A squabble looked to be breaking out over its shards.

Rubbing my forehead, still unsure as to what I did wrong, I put on the tabard and ill-fitting shoes, far too large for me. My hair I tucked under the man’s white cap, every strand of it. The wool immediately itched my ears to burning.

Did I stop to take a breath before surging into the corridor? Did I plan my excuses and escapes? Nope. Come on now: you know me better than that. I did not want to consider the consequences, thank you. I couldn’t let worry and caution slow me down. I had waited too damn long for this opportunity.

I grabbed a handful of fruit before escaping the cellar. A helpful tip if you are ever sneaking through a Venerance fortress at night: few people bother you if you look busy.

The corridor was a length of bright ochre marble and sconces carved in the likeness of the Great Watcher. Fruit of painted stone spilled from his carved legs. That was a laugh, I thought, for somebody who had grown up in the Ashlands near to the Watcher’s touch. I couldn’t believe this was the architectural effort the Venerance made for a humble worker’s corridor deep in the bowels of the Academy. I could only imagine what opulence waited above me.

The noise of the kitchens grew as I approached a grand archway masked by steam. The corridor branched out left and right, leading up to sweeping stairs. I knew the kitchens were not where I intended to be, but I couldn’t help but take a peek. My nose was already leading me. The smells of things roasting and poaching, stewing and frying dizzied me.

I crept under the archway and the roar of work blasted my ears. I felt as though I stood in a Canarva factory, not a kitchen. Between coiling marble pillars, vents of huge steel and stone ovens spewed steam. Chains and hooks on rattling girders hauled about giant cheeses and pieces of meat. Machinery clanked. Voices bellowed in constant overlap. Crockery and utensils clanged. I was barged aside by running workers.

I managed to pull myself away before I was dragged into playing my part too well and made to do chores. I could see head cooks striding about on raised walkways with long spoons, wielding them like duelling blades, and I ducked from their view.

The stairwells were cold after the heat of the kitchens. One floor up, the marble grew even grander and the lights somehow brighter. Instead of ovens and bubbling pots, I saw workshops filled with looms, huge webs of thread, bolts of cloths. Vats steamed with soaked clothing. Beyond, the stairs led to forges and smithies. Grindstones and long walls of caged weapons welcomed me.

Prosecutors stood here, silent and stoic and watchful. My armful of fruit was held like a shield, keeping me un-pestered. They only grew in number by the time I reached workshops where black-aproned workers gave way to figures that wore the white and blue of Venerance clerics. By the way these people carried themselves, how their heads were high instead of bowed, I knew they were not workers. Once you spend a while as a servant yourself, you can always spot another servant easy as pointing out the sun on a cloudless day.

These people didn’t work forges, but rather tinkered with finer tools and studied scrolls as much as the metal they toiled over. I spotted Augur swirls and curves between the glow of blightcores. They must have been intellects or engineers; clerics that devoted themselves to the sciences, alchemagic, and the ancients’ arts.

I was so fascinated by one table of trinkets that I stopped to stare, my brother momentarily forgotten. Between the white steel bars separating the corridor from the workshops, two intellects toiled over something large. One, a man with eyebrows bushier than his beard, berated the other with whacks of a short whip, the kind that I’d seen kumi riders use. I watched the younger man flinch with every hit, knuckles white around his tools. He must have been a handful of years older than me. Clasped to his shaved head was a mass of copper and blue metal that looked embedded into his skull. Complex cogs held a range of glass lenses that rotated back and forth, shrinking and magnifying a bright blue eye to inhuman sizes.

‘I don’t care what you think, that is not what I teach! The energy of a class four blightcore is not fit to integrate with a voiding peraplex in sequence. It will melt the blightcore and your hands along with it! Is this how they work in Jakah? Because if so, I have some harsh words to send those old southern masters that dispatched you here! Watcher’s mercy!’

‘But if the inhibitor rune is in the upright position—’

‘I said no, Rocaresh!’

Ah, another complainer. I wondered if the Academy was solely populated by them.

This Rocaresh fellow hunkered down into his desk as the old intellect left him with a parting whack.

‘What in the Realms is a voiding peraplex?’ I whispered to Rocaresh once he was out of earshot.

‘A mindgate with the function of transferring serranated blightcore heat energy of central condistrons for dissipation into runed circuits,’ he told me in a timid voice, barely meeting my eye.

I blinked as if I had just been slapped with words. ‘What?’

‘Augur technology,’ Rocaresh muttered.

‘Sounds like you’re having trouble with it.’

‘But I know I’m right!’ the man blurted, before quickly folding his hands and taking several sharp breaths. ‘Mother always says not to raise my voice at strangers.’

‘Depends on the stranger, I find,’ I said with a grin. Rocaresh smiled in return before flinching at a clang of metal at the far end of the workshop.

‘Back to work, Rocaresh!’ yelled the older intellect.

‘Is that your name?’

The intellect nodded. ‘Rocaresh of Tekmet.’

‘Rocaresh of Tekmet, wherever that is, don’t you listen to him,’ I said. ‘Elders aren’t always right. They get stuck in their ways while the Realms move past them, or so a wise man once told me.’

‘Very wise,’ Rocaresh mumbled. He could only meet my eyes for fleeting moments. ‘Who are you? Are you new like I am? I haven’t seen you here before.’

‘I’m curious, is what I am.’

‘What about?’

‘Godgears. Orechemy. Blightcores. All of it.’

Rocaresh beamed. He gestured to the contraption covering his face. ‘Me too. I made this myself. The others don’t seem to like it.’

‘Fruit?’ I offered a knobbly blue fruit through the bars.

‘Mother says its bad for my teeth.’

‘Mother’s not around, is she?’ I said.

Rocaresh’s intricate contraption whirred as another lens shifted over his eye, this own a dark green. He stared at something just to the side of me, causing me to turn. A prosecutor was walking a patrol down the corridor.

Rocaresh finally relented. He walked up to the bars like a drake hopping on a hot roof.

‘Do you like it here?’ I asked.

‘I thought I would,’ he said. ‘I thought they would listen to me. They never do. It’s no different from the workshops of Jakah. I’m beginning to think they sent me north to get rid of me.’

‘They don’t listen to you? But you seem like a smart chap.’

‘That’s what Mother says. It makes no sense to me,’ Rocaresh said. ‘Most people never do.’

I pointed a finger above, where the music now rumbled through the marble. ‘Sounds as if somebody celebrating.’

‘They’re congratulating a chosen one. Devoter Erro’s chosen one. Jinicirel from Midfire. There was a big battle in the lower city and she put an end to it.’

‘I saw it.’

Rocaresh gripped the bars, fascinated. ‘You did?’

‘I was down in the Vale when it happened.’

The intellect looked enraptured. ‘I’ve never seen the Guttervale. The others say it’s not safe. That it’s dirty and dark, and the air is poisoned. It sounds wonderful to me. They speak of tunnels that go on for miles. Augur cities, buried—’

The older intellect yelled across the tables at us. ‘Rocaresh! Back to work!’

Rocaresh looked torn.

‘Don’t they ever let you out of here?’ I asked.

The contraption covering half his face rattled as he shook his head. ‘No. Only sometimes, on the special days. Ceremonies or parades. But they let us walk the courtyards at night, but not tonight.’

‘Why not?’

Rocaresh held his shoulders up around his pointed ears as if mentioning the name would bring trouble. ‘Reverent Lectra has come. She doesn’t like to see a whisker of the workers or intellects. Has no time for us.’

I left the intellect standing at the bars as I swept away.

‘Bye,’ I heard Rocaresh whisper behind me.

Not only was Aberan here, but so was Lectra. In the very same building.

I stormed up the ever-widening stairwells into levels and corridors that were so polished I swore the marble flowed like liquid in the light. The twanging of lutes filled the night air. A woman sang a Venerance hymn in a painfully shrill tone while voices and laughter echoed down hallways.

I was not the only kitchen worker in these levels. I followed in the shadows of others delivering crystal bowls of soup and stew. Nobody paid me any attention, but when I came to a wall of silver-clad butlers and went as far as I could go without being questioned, I did a quick about turn and found a loftier route that brought me to a balcony overlooking a vast courtyard. It filled the giant building, wall to wall. Steel and wooden machinery sprouted across the marble flagstones like ugly trees. Some wore arms, others bore shields or dull swords. The more traditional wooden targets and dummies hung in long lines like the condemned.

Amongst the objects of training, white cloth tables were arranged in a square. A gaggle of figures stood amongst them, wearing the shining armour of chosen ones. Those in white Venerance robes hovered around them like flies. From devoters and piouses to intellects and prosecutor captains with medals on their uniforms.

Only one person sat apart: a figure on a flattened chair, lounging with her hands crooked in midair. I could not – even if I had tried for a thousand years – have forgotten that face. Those calm yet cutting eyes. That smirk of absolute certainty of being untouchable. The giant swordsaint by her side, silent and staring through the sits of her white helmet.

I gazed down upon Reverent Lectra and her pet Orzona with my face darkened by hatred and jealousy.

My eyes immediately began to search for Aberan. I spied a pair of shadows sparring with wooden swords, and my attention focused like a spear. I watched, waiting for the shadows to prove themselves. One was a stranger, and though the other was turned away from me, I saw his movements, his gait, his demeanour, and every part of him I recognised.

I watched with held breath as Aberan at last turned from his trainer. And with a smile, no less, dear reader. With a smile upon his scarred face. A smile that told me I had been forgotten long ago and lost to a memory of a world that wasn’t his. I watched him take a glass of wine and raise it to the pourer, some pious with a grin far too large for his face. I did not stare upon a boy that had betrayed my very soul, but a stranger in his familiar skin. In the shining training armour of a would-be chosen one, I watched him strut about with his head held higher than I had ever seen. There was a glow to his skin. A certainty to his movements I hated. A steel eyepatch covered the wounds that Wrekham had given Aberan, and that seemed the only shred left of the brother I had known in Canarva.

The more of him I watched, the deeper the emotions cut me. My flight from Canarva had smeared a lot of my wounds in forgetfulness, and now they rose to the surface like the fearsome heads of sea monsters. All that disappointment, all that terror and pain, came rushing back to me. In that moment, I almost hurled myself from the terrace to confront him. I felt cheated of a life now smashed to pieces on the rocks of his selfishness. I wanted to fulfil my destiny of murder right there, but for once, an inner voice told me no: there was a better day for such vengeance, and it was not this day. I was too soon. Even so, it took my whole being to hold myself back, clamping my mouth not to shout about his betrayal. His cowardice. His broken promises and his fake face, simpering to the Venerance pawns.

Full of detestation, I stared upon them both until a voice broke me from my bloodthirsty vigil.

‘Oi!’ came the cry of a prosecutor standing at a nearby doorway. ‘What are you doin’ up here?’

I didn’t answer her. Instead, I ran a zigzag path towards her and ducked her reaching hands. And so began my flight from the Academy. My stay had been brief, and now it needed to end whether I liked it or not.

Escaping onto the stairwell, the steps hammered my rushing feet. Shouts began to pile on my shoulders. I ran a weaving path between the corridors and workshops of the lower levels. You might be thinking it was a tactic to lose my curious pursuers. In truth, I was utterly lost. My mind was too full of rage.

Somehow, I found myself back in the workshops and staring through white-steel bars at the intellect I had met moments ago.

‘You,’ I hissed. ‘Rocaresh.’

Rocaresh bumbled up to the bars to listen to me. ‘I didn’t think you would be back. Even though Mother said you would.’

I didn’t pause to question whatever madness he was on about. ‘I have one question for you, Rocaresh: do you want to know a life beyond these walls? Or do you want to spend the rest of that life here, ending up like that old prick over there?’

Rocaresh clutched at the steel. ‘I have always dreamed about seeing more,’ he said. Rocaresh turned to the side as if listening to somebody else. He shook his head. ‘But I’ve given them my life. I can’t leave. They won’t let me. If they catch me trying, I—’

I slammed my hands against the bars. ‘Choose, Intellect! Come with me and get to practise all the Augur magic you want, or stay here and rot under the watch of those lesser than you.’

I watched the cogs in Rocaresh’s mind turn, hoping they were in my direction. It seemed there were many cogs, and they needed much crunching. Far too much for a swift escape. My mind was still clogged with the sight of Aberan living his Venerance life.

‘Rocaresh!’ I yelled, startling him. ‘Make a decision!’

‘I don’t even know who you are.’

‘My name is Dwellin, and I can offer you all the freedom you’ve dreamed about. No more Venerance. No being yelled at.’

I watched Rocaresh glance from his superior to the door that kept him a Venerance captive. It took him three turns for him to decide, and in the end, he ran to the gap in the bars.

‘Good choice,’ I hissed.

‘But how are you going to get out? This place is a fortress,’ Rocaresh asked.

‘You know, for future reference, these are the sorts of questions you ask before you decide to escape.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Rocaresh admitted.

I whirled, forcing him down a sharp angle of stairwell. ‘You don’t need to apologise. You just need to run a little faster!’

I pushed the bumbling intellect before me, and like a balloon with a leak, he tore off into the lower levels at such speed that I barely kept up.

‘Left!’ I yelled to him, as we sprinted past the kitchens.

He heard my order almost too late, pawing for purchase and scrabbling behind me. I was starting to regret my decision to bring him.

‘What are you really?’ he asked, straightening his uniform.

‘Somebody who believes power shouldn’t be in Venerance hands. You got a problem with that?’

Rocaresh thought about that for a moment, finger actually pressed to his chin and magnified eye staring at the ceiling. ‘I don’t think I have. Mother agrees with you.’

‘Good enough for me.’

With a hand fixed on his collar, I dragged the intellect down the corridor to the cellar. I manhandled an empty wagon while he stood and wrung his hands.

‘Little help!’ I snapped as I tried to coax a paracrax from its pen. The promise of food helped, and with a yampear, I drew a bird close enough to encircle a harness around its feathered neck.

I was fastening the last buckle when a weight struck me from the side. I fell to the floor and looked up to find the worker I’d trussed up gurning several inches from my face.

‘Sinner!’ he seethed.

I hit him hard in the face. It was enough to make him recoil, but he still pinned me down. I don’t know what it was with this worker, but instead of shrinking away as I’d hoped, he started hollering for the prosecutors.

‘Help! Help me!’

I acted swiftly and without remorse. I dug the fish-knife into his throat, silencing his screams. The next stab was to his skull, and it made him cross-eyed and still. I shuffled the body off me to the horror of Rocaresh.

‘You understand he gave me no choice,’ I told both him and myself as I wiped the blood from my face and neck. There was no time to pause. I took the second seat and the paracrax’s reins, and with a whistle, we were away down the corridor. I made sure to have the bird kick the doors so the prosecutors would scurry before me. They did exactly that, and with a snap of reins, we disappeared into the streets before they could call us to halt.

I led the paracrax and wagon a winding path with a fogged mind, turning arbitrarily as I replayed every single twitch of Aberan and Lectra’s face within myself. Every smile and self-confident glance. Every laugh and confident swagger. Every reason I wanted to destroy them both.

No doubt scaring Rocaresh with my wild grin, I sped us wildly into the night.