Chapter 5
Bek
Year One
“Welcome to the Academy of Kindness.” The address came from a dumpy woman of middling years with an apologetic face. She seemed out of place on a platform that looked more like a gallows than a speaker’s podium. “Most of you will not survive the next ten years.”
Bek glanced at her cohort, one hundred children huddled on a windswept courtyard, still wearing the clothes their parents or their own cunning had provided them with.
A mixture of emotions fluttered across their faces: fear, determination, some measure of defiance, even amusement.
Surprise was the absentee. Whatever illusions they had carried through the gates with them, none were ignorant of the basics.
The Academy graduated three students a year, three Kindly Ones, supposedly incarnations of the trio whose name you did not speak.
The three who came for those who broke the oldest laws, the three who would hunt down any transgressor—mortal or god.
Some held that the Academy of Kindness trained nothing save assassins.
Very, very good ones, but common murderers even so.
Many more believed, though, both in the promise and in the threat.
Retribution and its embodiment were something that the servants of many different faiths could agree upon, an ancient, natural justice that cut through lesser laws, both the secular and the sacred.
Bek’s mother, who had let her slip from tear-soaked hands, told her to believe.
It was, her mother had said, belief that would carry her through the trials ahead.
The same belief that the Academy’s power rested upon.
It was, after all, their reputation as much as their skill that opened doors for the Kindly Ones.
Bek listened as the unimpressive woman laid out a series of horrific truths before the children. The woman—Kindness Marta—stood wrapped in a dark swirl of cloak that the wind kept trying to snatch from her.
“The lichgate, there on the left by the sanatorium.” She pointed to a door so studded with diamonds of black iron that the wood barely showed. “In a moment Kindness Undu will open it wide and until the sun sets all of you will be free to leave without repercussions.”
“Without repercussions from them!” A girl behind Bek snorted. “My uncle has a man out there ready to kill me if I leave. The Academy takes its money back if we go, unless our bodies are returned by morning.”
Kindness Marta’s address continued. “Your last chance for a change of heart. Please do consider taking this opportunity. After sunset the gate will return to its purpose—to allow for the carrying out of any corpses to which families lay claim—and it will continue to be the only way to leave this establishment before completion of your training. Unauthorized departures from that point on will result in the miscreant being hunted down. And as you know, hunting miscreants is what the order does best.”
A figure, previously unseen in the shadow of the wall, now moved to open the lichgate.
A fat, bald, fish-belly-pale woman also in the black cloak of a Kindness.
Bek wondered how such poor specimens as Marta and Undu could have survived the training that would kill up to ninety-seven of the children huddled with her in the wind’s teeth.
Though, even as she wondered this, around ten of the candidates hurried shamefacedly towards the exit.
Whatever threats or promises their families had made to get them through the front gate now proved insufficient to stop them slipping out of the side one while the chance remained.
Perhaps in Undu’s and Marta’s years everyone but them had had the common sense to leave at this stage.
Kindness Marta opened her mouth to speak again only to be interrupted by a shrill cry from the slopes outside. It seemed that it wasn’t just the girl in the second row’s uncle who had killers out there.
“The world that gives us one hundred daughters each year to spend in such a cause is not one that would tolerate the loss of one hundred sons. A hundred and seventy-three classes. A hundred and seventy-three years. Seventeen thousand three hundred children.
“It’s a world that many of you would return to in a heartbeat to escape the death that haunts our halls. But in our early years the records say that we had no bars on our windows and that no threats of retribution were needed to keep the girls here. We did not hunt down those who left us.
“In those days the Academy paid only a token fee to the families of our acolytes, a loaf of black rye: daughters were unwanted mouths to feed. But payment is a necessary part of our Creed, whether a token or a burden. Money is older than our civilization and as old as any of those that have passed. Money is the salve that keeps the vengeance on which we trade from consuming the world. Some sins can be paid for only with blood; but naked murder, absent compounding crimes of hospitality, oath, or kin, is, according to the ancient lore, something that may be atoned for by the paying of a wergild—the blood-gold that may comfort and sustain the victim’s family.
“And similarly, when we take a child from a family, a price must be paid in compensation. When I came here the Academy paid my father one bronze mark. I paid your fathers nine, each bearing the Academy’s three-whip stamp.
Next year we are offering a silver mark for each girl.
You can get a sturdy young donkey for a piece of silver!
“Try buying a hundred sons of Abrona for silver. Even for a gold mark you might struggle to find a healthy man-child for sale within a day’s march of this spot.
These facts are not a surprise to you. You know them to be true.
You have been taught your value since the day of your birth.
Likely by your own parents, and if not, then by the streets, by the institutions, the faiths, and the leaders of our society.
“Here, and here alone, can a woman take up a blade and slice away a life. Here and here alone does our world learn to fear us, and only through fear can respect be wrested from unwilling hands.
“If we merely trained you to be deadly. If all we did was to produce the most skilled assassins and sword masters, surpassing in their art, this would not be sufficient.
We would be swept away, stamped out. Those who held power over us would have seen the danger, like the first flames flickering among the furniture, and they would have accepted the necessary cost to reverse what would suddenly have seemed like a foolish decision: that of allowing the triple-goddess her own house among the faiths.
“Fear was required. Terror. We needed to produce monsters and to be seen to do so with such reckless ferocity that our first Kindnesses would be accepted as the flesh-borne avatars of the three sisters who chastise the gods themselves.
“We are as vicious as we have to be. As loud as we must be.
As cruel as is needed. What we do here is a dark prayer to the eternal.
A threat carved into our own flesh. We say to the world that if we hold the lives in our care more cheaply than do you who sold them to us, what price do you think we set upon your life, be you priest or general, lord, duke, or king?
“The people know what we do here. They speak of it in whispers, but the unspoken part is deafening: if we do this to ourselves—what will we do to them?”
She paused her oratory and continued, in less theatrical tones.
“Once your training has begun you cannot of course be allowed to leave with those secrets save as a fully approved graduate. So please do think about the decision. And for now, that’s all I have for you.
Kindness Terra will take you to your chamber.
Breakfast is served at dawn, lessons begin at sunrise.
Miss the first and you’ll go hungry. Miss the second and you’ll get a strike. ”
Kindness Terra actually looked the part: a lean, terrifyingly tall woman with scars seaming her hollow cheeks, and eyes like pieces of broken glass. She beckoned the children and set off towards a nearby door.
The Academy had been built in a great square, with fortress walls facing outwards, and castle-like chambers filling the space within, save for the central courtyard that accounted for perhaps half the area enclosed.
Overhead, crows circled, black against the red stain of the sky.
Others crowded the tower tops, and the stink of death rose whenever the wind fell.
Kindness Terra led them through unlit corridors of rough stone.
The light pooling beneath infrequent wall slits made islands of illumination through which the bowed heads of children bobbed in her wake.
She stopped at an arched door and unlocked it with a heavy key.
The hall they filed into was large enough to accommodate the full intake of one hundred.
Bek imagined that the chambers farther down the corridor where Years Two to Ten were housed would be progressively smaller.
The thought rekindled the mild panic that had seized her ever since the day her father had summoned her into the tiny room he called his study and explained that a great opportunity had opened itself to her.
As the last child shuffled into the room, the door closed behind her. A long, still moment passed, broken only when a particularly large girl with a brutally blunt face declared loudly, “We’re allowed to kill each other, you know.”
“We know, Lucia!”
“You first!”
A wave of responses, mainly anger and outrage, bubbled through the hall as the girls nearest to the big one pushed back, seeking to claim more distant beds. Lucia just sneered and settled her mountainous form down on her blankets as if she hadn’t a care in the world.