Chapter 18
Mollandra
Year Three
Even as the water level in the sump room reached the airholes set into the sides of the ten coffins, Mollandra still knew that Einsa would defeat the lock. She and Meery were the only two still trapped, but Meery’s uncanny luck and Einsa’s endless competence would see them free before…before…
“They’re drowning!” The words burst from Mollandra unbidden. “Get them out of there!”
Tmanga and Sharp were on her before she could move, each anchoring an arm while some few among her classmates tore their fascinated, horrified gazes from the coffins to glance her way in puzzlement. This was what the Academy did. This was how a hundred became three.
“She could still do it,” Tmanga grunted with the effort of holding Mollandra back.
Time passed with an impossible combination of agonizing sloth and the speed of a racing heart. The relentlessly rising water reached the top of the nearest coffin and flooded over the rusted metal plate.
Any noise from within the occupied coffins remained inaudible beneath the rush of water and the sound of acolytes whose survival depended on their fellows’ deaths urging Einsa and Meery to even now break free.
Gholla had been tight with Meery since the first year, and her screams were already the heartbroken heartbreaking kind.
Brooth, whose necromancy made Mollandra expect her to be as cold and strange as Undu, called Einsa’s name through streaming tears.
Mollandra fought her friends, on the very brink of violence. “I have to—”
An unexpected light lit within Einsa’s coffin, red rage shining out through every airhole, bleeding into the water.
“What…?” Mollandra’s comprehension failed.
Steam began to break from the surface of the troubled waters around Einsa’s coffin, bubbling fiercely. And into the acolytes’ astonished silence a muffled detonation thrust its way a mere heartbeat before a white explosion of frothing water and flame felled them all.
Darkness and confusion reigned until, after the passage of some unknown time, Instructor Akki returned bearing a lantern from the next chamber to replace the light that the wall of water had extinguished.
Free of Tmanga and Sharp now, and with her bearing restored, Mollandra rushed towards the coffins, splashing noisily through the knee-deep flood.
The lid of Einsa’s was gone, blown off and sunk.
And for one glorious moment Mollandra believed she would find her friend sitting up amid the steaming waters.
Tmanga splashed up to her side, Sharp on her heels.
“Give them nothing.” Tmanga put her hand on Mollandra’s shoulder.
“Akki’s looking for you to break,” Sharp hissed.
Einsa’s face was peaceful, and Mollandra envied her that, but the rest of her body gave the lie to that impression.
Impossibly, livid burns marked her skin and sections of her robe lay torn or charred or both.
Missing fingernails, and rust flakes jammed beneath those that remained, told the story of her final panic and hopeless struggle.
Mollandra turned and looked at Treecie, the acolyte who had occupied the coffin immediately before Einsa.
There could be many interpretations for the girl’s look of sick fascination as she stared at the floating body.
Many would be imagining that it could have so easily been them lying there, or would be still wrestling with the source and nature of that final explosion.
Two places along, Instructor Akki opened the last coffin that remained locked. Meery’s uncanny luck had finally deserted her. She wore a vacant expression, perhaps with a hint of mild surprise, long fair hair floating around her in the water that had ceased to rise.
Mollandra looked back at Treecie on the steps before returning her gaze to her friend.
“Something…” Mollandra reached a hand towards Einsa’s coffin, her fingers questing as if they could pluck answers from amid the wisps of steam.
She felt a strange quality in the air, as if veins of heat ran through it, like quartz through rock.
The steam held a scent too—one unlike any that Mollandra had smelled before.
A scent that infected her lungs and trembled in her blood, as if rage had been made accessible to all the senses. “There’s something there…”
“You look sick.” Sharp grinned, as if this were a good thing, as if their friend weren’t lying drowned just yards before them. “Your lips are blue.”
“She was so angry…” Mollandra recognized the trembling of her own weak necromancy. Kindness Undu had despaired of her, but the Kindness had always said the connection with loved ones was the strongest of all: Those we would most wish a peaceful sleep to are the very ones we’re most able to disturb.
Mollandra snapped around to face Treecie. “You did something. Something to the lock. That’s why she couldn’t get out!”
“No! I didn’t.” Treecie shook her head violently, face shading crimson while her neck went white as alabaster. “I would never. I liked—”
“Liar!” The roar that burst from Mollandra was far louder than any noise she’d made before and surprised her as much as the rest of them. Nearly everyone took a step back. “Death challenge. You choose the battle.” Mollandra rubbed her neck.
“Get out.” Instructor Akki waved them away as if she had no time for their foolishness.
Mollandra turned towards the woman, who now had her back to them once more as she reached to heave Meery from her coffin.
The water soaking Mollandra’s robes had begun to cool, already losing the heat of Einsa’s last fury.
She took a step towards the instructor, and again Tmanga caught her arm while Sharp only broadened her grin.
Mollandra shook her head. Bek’s madness had infected her but she wouldn’t go down like Bek.
The Academy had more to teach her before she could teach it a lesson of her own.
The acolytes hurried away, muttering among themselves. It was a bad month if they lost a single member of the class. To have lost two in a day with a third promised was high drama.
Mollandra kept her eye on Treecie. She was the type to try to end the death challenge before it even started.
They all were, to be fair. But killing a classmate was a surefire way to get the rest of the class to band against you.
If Sharp, for example, were to start working her way through Year Three with sword in hand on the floor of the Wound Garden, one death challenge after the next, then the whole class would rise against her.
It was the only sensible course of action.
Thus, Mollandra had given Treecie warning and the choice of both weapons and ground.
She couldn’t afford to be seen as a general threat.
This was a personal matter, and Treecie’s end would be the end of it.
This was also the reason that Mollandra had murdered Lucia in secret on the first night and had never admitted it to anyone, not even to Bek or Einsa.
The walk from the dungeons to the dorm was a long one, despite what some said about the gap between sleep and death being so slender.
Mollandra lagged at the rear of the group.
The fact of Einsa’s death was a large, sharp-cornered thing that wouldn’t sit comfortably in her chest, and every time she tried to wrestle it into a better place it made her hurt.
The pain leaked from her eyes just as it had with Bek, though there she had managed to reach the privacy of her covers before allowing the agony to have its way with her.
“You’re with us now.” Tmanga fell back to walk with her.
Sharp joined them, pressing her habitual smile into a flat line. “Einsa was all right. That’s all I’m going to say.”
Mollandra kept her head down, refusing to comment on the implied new dynamic. Tmanga shared what Einsa had had, a belief in herself that ran too deep to need to be stated or shown. But belief alone wouldn’t carry anyone to the end of the Academy’s cruel games.
“You shouldn’t have let Treecie choose,” Tmanga said. “She’s strongest where you’re weakest.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Mollandra kept her stinging eyes on the floor, safe with Sharp and Tmanga at her side. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Ha!” Sharp’s laugh sounded hollow in the vaults. “It really doesn’t. Nothing does.”
Einsa had mattered to Mollandra, though she had never said so.
She didn’t say so now either. Sharp skipped along the surfaces of the world.
Perhaps it was just a defence to keep from hurting, or it might be that was all she was.
All of them were broken in some way or other.
If they hadn’t been when they arrived, after three years they were more fracture than flesh.
That seemed to be the Academy’s recipe: grind them down and build something new from the pieces.
“Are we going to talk about what happened?” Sharp leaned in, still kneeling on her own neighbouring bed.
“She drowned.” Mollandra didn’t have any more to say about it.
“She exploded!” Sharp mimed the eruption of water with both hands. “What in all the hells was that?”
“Magic that her mother taught her,” Tmanga said. “Something the Kindnesses know.”
“She should have used it earlier.” Sharp shook her head. “I’d be using it all the time.”
“It didn’t look like very safe magic,” Tmanga said.
“So?” Sharp gave her a puzzled look, turning to Mollandra for support.
“She loved us.” Mollandra shrugged helplessly. “She would never let that loose with friends around her.”
“She—” And for once Sharp had the grace to hold her tongue.
She would never have made it to the last three. Mollandra knew what Sharp had been about to say, and was grateful that she had not said it.
“I’ll take first watch tonight.” Tmanga settled on Einsa’s bed.
Mollandra shook her head. “It’s not like I’ll be sleeping.”