Chapter 7
Bek
Year One
Although the women who served breakfast in the Academy’s great hall were variously maimed, they all shared two mutilations.
All nine had an ugly circular brand on their foreheads, and someone had taken their noses, leaving a wound that left Bek with little appetite for the porridge dumped into the bowl before her.
“Acolytes who nearly made it.” Einsa bent to the task of scooping oatmeal into her face at a rate that made it seem she must have been raised by wolves.
“I thought they all died,” Mollandra whispered on the girl’s right.
“Almost all.” Einsa spoke through a full mouth. “Some taken on as staff. Marked so they don’t run off.”
Bek shuddered. The woman who’d served her had been wrinkled, grey-haired, and lacked a hand.
A much younger woman, similarly noseless and branded, but with both hands, clumped along the aisle between the next two long benches on a wooden foot.
It seemed a slow death to Bek. She hoped the Kindnesses had something quicker on offer for her.
The first years sat on their own four benches running the width of the hall.
Sitting opposite Bek, Einsa, and Mollandra were the girl with the shaved head and pink scar, the redhead with the wild grin who had pronounced their mutual doom with such glee the night before, and a lean, dark-eyed girl with a seemingly permanent frown.
The redhead declared that she was Sharp—which sounded like a lie. She named her neighbour with the scar Tmanga, and the girl with the frown Wenda.
“Who killed Lucia?” Sharp asked as if this were everyday talk at the breakfast table.
Einsa waved the question away as if it were a fly seeking her bowl.
Bek noted that the acolytes in the second year and above all wore the same clothes: collarless tunics with loose sleeves, and trousers like the skilled men in the city wore.
Those closest to her had white tunics, shading into greys as the years advanced, not from lack of washing but with proximity to the black of a Kindness.
Their numbers dwindled as their clothes darkened.
Where the first years filled four benches, the second years occupied only three benches, the third years also three but more sparsely, the fourth years two, diminishing towards the far platform where the trio of Kindnesses sat together with six noseless instructors, black-robed but white-sleeved.
These, Einsa supplied, must have failed during the last year or two, though even getting that far rarely meant earning a tutor’s job instead of the axe.
Bek paused to watch the high table eat. All of them spooned what seemed to be the same bland porridge into their faces without conversation.
All save Kindness Undu, who didn’t touch her food and instead let her gaze wander across the acolytes at their benches.
Her eyes seemed to find Bek’s and Bek looked down suddenly, paying renewed attention to the chatter around her.
“There’s only three Kindnesses, though?” Mollandra again, still with little more than a whisper. “Don’t they all come here to teach once they get old?”
“Old?” Einsa snorted. “Kindly Ones don’t get old.”
“How do you know all this?” Bek watched the big girl eat, wondering if she was one of those people who simply invented to cover their ignorance.
“My mother was a Kindness.” She didn’t look up from her private eating contest.
Bek’s brows rose of their own accord. “I didn’t think they were supposed to have children.”
“Who’s going to tell them no?” Einsa shrugged. “Also, why do you think I’m here? They did wait until she died, though…”
Before the Kindnesses stood, signalling an end to the meal, Einsa further explained that while first-year acolytes were not forbidden from murdering each other—just as the unfortunate Lucia had announced the previous evening—it was forbidden to murder any acolyte in the years below your own.
So the older, more skilled girls were not going to be slaughtering their way through ranks of twelve-year-olds.
Self-defence and retribution were fine, though, if any overambitious youngster tried their hand against those above them.
The first year, the one hundred and seventy-third first year taken into the Academy of Kindness, began their formal education with a lesson given by Kindness Undu.
Because of the size of the class they remained in the dining hall after all the other years had absented themselves and the nine servants had cleared away the bowls, piling them in teetering columns.
Undu stayed on the platform where she had eaten.
Bald and round, there was nothing about the Kindness to give away the fact that she was a woman, save that the Academy admitted only girls.
The Kindly Ones of legend, the trio who even the gods feared, were women.
Alecto—unceasing in her anger, implacable.
Tisiphone—she who avenges, retribution made flesh.
And Megaera, the trio’s memory, keeper of grudges, custodian of feuds, jealous guardian of old fires.
“I am Kindness Undu.” She spoke in the fluting voice of a child rather than that of someone who looked to have eaten too many children. “Let me echo the words with which Kindness Marta sent you to your beds last night:
“You are here to suffer and to die. And in this crucible, we will find the strength this order requires. Some few of you who prove worthy, those who survive the harrowing, will be woven into the whips that scourge the wicked of our world. You will join the ranks of the Kindnesses. We who guard the last glimmer of divinity that once sprinkled down from heaven upon the heads of mortals. We who uphold the oldest laws that stand between humanity and its descent into beasts. The guilty, be they peasant or prince, fear us, just as the gods themselves fear the Kindly Ones.” She smiled around at the girls as if she had just enquired after their grandmothers’ health.
Rubbing her plump white hands together, she continued.
“My lesson is one that likely none of you will ever learn, and the only skill on whose mastery your lives do not depend. I am here to teach you about the river, and even among the Kindly Ones few have stood upon its banks. Fewer still, perhaps none that remain, have drunk its waters as I have and understood some portion of death’s mysteries. ”
“Shit…” Einsa muttered. “Day one, lesson one: necromancy.”
Two of the servants in their grey tunics entered the hall carrying a stretcher that supported some heavy object covered with a bedsheet.
“Stand back,” the front one growled as she led the way between the first-year benches and those of the second.
Chairs grated and feet scuffled as girls tried to make room. Cold fear gripped Bek: the servants were coming towards her. They were going to deposit their ominous burden right in front of her in the very spot her bowl had occupied minutes before.
But no, the two servants stopped a few yards short and scattered more acolytes as, with some effort, the pair hefted the stretcher onto the long table. Neither sought instruction from the Kindness, just bowed their heads and departed. Bek detected a slight quickening in their stride as they left.
Kindness Undu levered herself from her chair and descended the platform. Acolytes cleared the path ahead of her as she came down between the benches towards the stretcher and its lump.
“Gather round,” Undu trilled. “Gather round. Sit, stand, sit on the tables, stand on the tables. Tiers, you see? An amphitheatre of acolytes. How nice.” With a flourish she snatched the sheet away, clutching it to her in a small white hand.
Bek had already thought that it would be Lucia under there, but even so the shock of seeing the girl so close, without the mercy of the dormitory’s gloom, drained the blood from her extremities.
The dry, tingling cough that had started to plague her chose this moment to rise and wrap its scratchy fingers around her throat.
She resisted, every part of her still, frozen in place.
The healer had said the dropsy would claim her lungs before its other effects became too pronounced.
She would die gasping for air, hauling her last breaths into ragged sacks.
Perhaps she would look worse than Lucia at the end. She hoped not.
Lucia smelled, a sewer stench, and her discoloured features were frozen in a look that mixed fear and pain into something awful.
Bloodstains and dried saliva around her mouth showed that she had fought.
The ligature had been removed and the skin on her neck was mottled black, dark blue, a livid purple, nothing that looked natural, and yet what was more natural than death?
The gouges were from her own fingers where she must have clawed at her throat, reaching everywhere but beneath the twisted strip of cloth that she’d been trying to get hold of.
“This young lady was Lucia Aqualas Divinanar. Daughter to General Aquinas of the Western Artan legions. I say was because she is currently elsewhere and only echoes of her remain.” Kindness Undu took Lucia’s hand in her own soft, white grip, lifting the girl’s arm.
“The corpse is cool but not cold. The limbs retain some of the stiffness that follows a couple of hours behind death’s visit.
” Undu let the hand fall and it settled with unnerving slowness.
“Lucia herself, the girl you probably did not find time to get to know, is standing by a river, one that few among the living can see or even hear, and yet it flows through all things, never more than a careless moment from any of us. Soon she will cross that river and answer to old gods whose names have been forgotten. She will carry their judgement into the sunless lands beyond. And this flesh, all of us, and even time itself, will be left behind her, forgotten and unmourned.”