Chapter 11
Bek
Year Two
Instructor Mary had barely survived her time as an acolyte, and before the Kindnesses offered her a rare reprieve and disfigured her by cutting off her nose, she had been maimed during her training. Three fingers from her right hand had been given to the cause, along with her left eye.
What the cause was, and why it was worthy of such sacrifice, Bek had yet to discover.
Instructor Mary’s acceptance of a life where day in and day out she helped drill the act of murder into children, in a process that would kill nearly all of them, enraged Bek.
So far, the main lesson that a year at the Academy had taught her was to hate the institution and each of the components that made it function.
“We’re falling behind again,” Einsa huffed.
The forest hemmed them in, sealing away all but a thin grey ribbon of sky where the path ran.
Each bend removed the rest of the class from sight, and by Bek’s count over fifty of the second year were ahead of them, with just Sallay, Mirina, and Thurli behind them.
One sick, one hobbling on an infected foot, and the other slow but relentless.
Thurli would overtake them soon enough if Bek couldn’t pick up her pace.
And when Thurli passed by, it would leave just two girls between Bek and the instructor stalking them through the leaf-choked paths.
Technically it would leave Einsa and Mollandra there too, but Einsa could keep herself out of trouble, and Mollandra seemed able to run all day, perhaps because she was so light that the wind carried her along.
They called it the Hard Run and it had started in the second year, proving to be a monthly event. The girl who came last was killed, but only if she failed to complete the circuit within the time allotted by the water clock.
While a year at the Academy had hardened Bek’s body, her lungs just got worse at their job, and she had only survived the previous two runs because she wasn’t last. The final few drops had dripped from the clock as she’d staggered down the home straight.
And each month, Instructor Mary reduced the time available.
“I heard that when Kindness Undu did her second year she left twelve corpses behind her and walked back,” Einsa panted. They’d all heard the story before, but it took Bek’s mind off the pain.
“We could kill Thurli,” Mollandra suggested.
“No!” Bek gasped, wasting precious air. She glanced back and saw Instructor Mary rounding the bend in the road. The woman ran the course at what she estimated to be the water-clock pace. If she overtook you she would be waiting at the clock with knife in hand. “No killing.”
Einsa and Mollandra exchanged a look.
“No. Killing.” Bek wouldn’t let Thurli die for her. If this run didn’t make an end of her, then the next one would, or the one after it. That was what they were for—culling the weak, finishing off anyone too injured in the course of their training to progress to the next year.
The instructor’s slow, relentless pace ate away at the gap between them. They accelerated down the muddy, rock-studded slopes of the river valley, where roots coiled in a constant frozen effort to trip the unwary.
Bek splashed through the ford, jolting over the stony riverbed, gasping at the coldness of the water. As they climbed the wooded slopes on the far side, it began to rain, a grey deluge falling from grey skies.
Bek gasped and floundered in her exhaustion, losing coordination, glancing off a tree, the rough bark tearing at her.
She’d told herself not to look back, but she did.
Instructor Mary was hard on her heels, breath snorting through the ruinous hole left when the Kindnesses took her nose and spared her life.
How long, Bek wondered, before the woman failed to beat the clock herself? She claimed that on that day the Kindnesses would replace her too. And on she came, torturing them as she herself continued to be tortured, grim-faced, dedicated to the empty enterprise of manufacturing killers.
Einsa and Mollandra stayed with Bek as she fell farther back, even after the instructor passed them, with Thurli just a yard behind, puffing like a smith’s bellows.
Mollandra’s loyalty Bek understood. Bek had picked her, one of the youngest and weakest, to join their trio.
And Bek had helped teach her—not to read and write, which despite her peasant raggedness and her claims on entry day, she turned out to do surprisingly well.
Instead, it was with the common things she needed instruction, the easy everyday stuff, how to eat, how to clean herself: begging the question of quite what frying pan she had been seared in before falling into the Academy’s fire.
There was a surprising fierceness to the girl. Zero compromise. Which seemed to extend to their friendship too. Bek had tried to be worthy of that commitment.
Einsa was harder to work out. She’d walked away from them that first week, only to return the same evening, gruff, angry at herself, swearing…
but there. And she’d stayed. The girl didn’t need either of them.
She was strong. Good at everything. Excellent at combat.
Instructor Clakka had taught them the word “pragmatism,” which seemed to be a fancy way of saying flexible, but in terms of attitude.
The word summed Einsa up in almost every aspect.
She wasn’t the kind to die on any given hill—everything could be surrendered if it became too much of a burden.
So when Bek fell with a scream, snared around the ankle by a tree root, she couldn’t say why Einsa hauled her to her feet.
Sallay puffed past them, crimson-faced, deep in the grip of a fever and still faster than Bek.
It left only Mirina, and even now Bek could hear the cry of pain every time the girl set down her infected foot.
A rhythmic chant of hurt but growing closer even so.
And at last, as her senses closed in on themselves, from somewhere came the cawing of crows.
“Did we make it?” Bek lay in confusion, flat on her back, wheezing. Shadows flickered across the arched stone ceiling above her.
“No, this is the underworld and Lucia Aqualas Divinanar wants a word.” Einsa’s face loomed into view.
Bek had a flash of memory. Einsa and Mollandra holding an arm each. They’d practically carried her towards the finish, towards Instructor Mary and that damned clock, no longer dripping. There had been screaming. Not her. But close behind. Poor Mirina, trying so hard.
“I hate them all,” Bek wheezed.
“Who?” Mollandra, sitting beside her, leaned into view, looking tired but victorious.
“The Kindnesses, the instructors, my family. All of them. I want to burn this place to the ground and bury the rubble.”
“Somebody’s starting to sound like a Kindness.” Undu’s bulk swayed vertiginously into Bek’s vision.
“She didn’t mean—”
“She meant every word.” Undu spoke over Mollandra’s excuses and walked away.
Bek flopped her head exhaustedly to the side and watched the Kindness’s retreat.
“Creed next.” Einsa leaned over Bek and offered her hand.
“Oh joy.” Bek took hold and let herself be pulled to her feet.
Creed lessons made her angry too. Starting in Year Two, once a week, Kindness Marta taught the Creed—the theology that supposedly excused the torture, the killing, and every other horror that went into producing whatever it was that Kindnesses were.
Assassins of a sort, though stealth was not their preferred route.
Killers for a certainty. The triple-goddess, Marta told them, reading from scrolls cracking with age, wore many names and walked in many worlds.
She neither created nor ruled. She was, instead, a vital ingredient in any system.
The snake in the orchard. The imperfection in perfection.
The challenge—the test without which no meaning could be ascribed to victory.
She was a form of justice. Not that of scribes and ledgers.
Her laws were not written in ink, nor were they guidance for living.
These were not the pillars of utopian justice.
Rather they lay like snares, hidden in the grass, waiting for those who had already gone beyond justice and acted as laws unto themselves.
The old lore that humanity keeps in its bones.
These were the crimes that so often tripped the mighty in the moment of their triumph.
These were the laws that gods were ill-advised to break.
Creed lessons happened in a dark chapel lit by flames licking from oil lamps in sconces around the walls, and by a single round window high above the entrance, whose bloody light came through stained glass depicting a fortress in a sea of fire.
Mollandra sat scratching at her slate with furious concentration, tongue between her teeth.
Einsa scowled as she made her own sparse notes.
None of them would have paid attention save for the fact they knew the older girls were often called upon to argue points of the Creed when the continuation of their stay at the Academy hung in the balance.
A poor performance would seal their fate.
The Academy’s official motto was π?στη π?νω απ? τη συνε?δηση, “Creed above conscience.” Unofficially it was, “Leave the bodies.”