Chapter 18 #2
Tmanga shrugged, running her fingers down the pink scar that jagged across her brown cheek.
Mollandra had thought them all fractured, but wherever her fault lines ran, Tmanga alone kept them totally hidden, as if her scar stood in for all of them, a visible representation of what must run through her soul.
“Asleep or awake, I know you won’t be watching. ”
And so Mollandra surrendered to her pillow and lay in the stillness and the quiet. Later there would be screams. No night went by without the nightmares calling on at least one girl. After the coffins it would surely be more than one.
Einsa filled the blindness of Mollandra’s closed eyes.
Einsa floating. Einsa scowling. Einsa frowning at Mollandra’s weakness.
Einsa’s rough smile. This last one fastened Mollandra’s jaw, so tight that her teeth hurt and the muscles sang, but at least it kept the larger pain at bay, stopped it bursting from her throat.
Finally Bek came, standing by Einsa’s side as Einsa wrung the wetness from her hair.
Her presence made Mollandra feel both better and worse.
Happy for the comfort Bek offered their friend.
Sad for the full scope of her loss being on display.
Until that first night under the Academy’s roof, Mollandra had believed her life to be a worthless one.
She hadn’t expected any recognition from Bek, nor that the girl would offer her sanctuary.
But despite all that Mollandra had done, Bek had seen her and called her to her side.
Einsa she had not trusted at all. Mollandra had expected cruel tricks from the others, ploys to lower her guard, as a prelude to murder in the dark.
But somehow Bek’s open smile and Einsa’s gruff disapproval had made her hope.
It had been the fear that she was right, and that this miracle, this thrill of feeling, was real, that had been the spur that set her to the murder of Lucia. Mollandra had murdered her to put Bek’s mind at rest, to keep her safe, even if only for a short time.
Mollandra hadn’t even considered killing an instructor until Bek died.
Whether she would have added Akki to her list after today’s events if Treecie hadn’t worked her act of sabotage, she couldn’t say, but for now Treecie was the one who would have to pay.
Mollandra didn’t know if it would stop the hurting that she still so poorly understood, but if it did, even a little, then the killing wouldn’t stop with Treecie.
Mollandra sat up suddenly, causing the girls in the nearest half-dozen beds to reach reflexively for their knives. “I’m going to have to kill them all…”
Sharp snorted from the bed behind her. “Welcome to my world.”
Treecie’s chosen ground was the Bone Garden.
Her weapons: whatever could be improvised on the spot.
Her reasoning was clear. Mollandra would destroy her with sword or knife.
Barehanded, Treecie’s height and reach should give her an advantage, but nobody expected Mollandra to lose that fight either.
The reason for the choice was not, however, that Treecie would feel much more confident clubbing Mollandra with a thighbone.
It was that the Bone Garden was such dangerous ground that it evened many odds, and that while Mollandra had shown little talent for necromancy, Treecie was second only to Bek and to pale little Brooth when it came to interacting with the dead.
For Treecie’s plan to have any chance, she would need Kindness Undu’s permission.
Undu held the key to the Bone Garden, and neither acolyte had ever been through those iron gates.
The third years had been given necromancy sessions in the hand-hewn cavern before the gates on several occasions.
Here, Undu said, they were close enough to gain some benefits while avoiding the many risks of entering the catacombs beyond, though why Undu would talk of risks in an academy that regularly tried to kill its pupils, Mollandra didn’t know.
Perhaps she just liked to have more control in the nature and timing of their deaths.
Mollandra had both hoped and expected that Kindness Undu would refuse their request out of hand.
Killing Treecie more easily and more publicly would please Mollandra better.
But against the odds the Kindness had favoured both girls with a measured stare from the black and deep-set stones of her eyes, then smiled one of her rare, unnerving smiles. “If that’s your choice, dears.”
And so, instead of eating the midday meal, the majority of the third year followed Kindness Undu and the clinking of her keys down through the dank corridors and slippery steps that wound into the Academy’s depths.
Mollandra came wearing three crow’s feathers in her hair.
She had found them that morning on the courtyard steps where she and Bek and Einsa had sat so often, watching their classmates—their competitors—enjoying the truce that held beneath the open sky.
There had been good moments among all the fear and death and dying.
Sunny days when Einsa had made them laugh.
Mollandra wore two of the black feathers for the deaths of her friends.
And one for her own death, which, whether it came soon or late, she would meet with a snarl and a fight to the bitterest end.
The stink of the Garden built slowly, then rapidly, until it became a choking attack on the nose, throat, and lungs.
Trips to the Bone Garden were never taken on a full stomach.
While the vast majority of the over ten thousand girls to have been carried down to the catacombs were now, as the name implied, mere bones and grinning skulls, there was inevitably a constant flow of “fresh meat” that rotted there.
Any girl whose family had not requested that her remains be repatriated through the lichgate was taken to the catacombs.
No effort was made to disguise the stench. Mollandra had smelled it on her first day and lived with it for years. Only when she came to the corridor leading to the final chamber did it start to bother her. Otherwise, it was simply a constant element of her life. She breathed death in every day.
“She’ll be in there already,” Sharp said, elaborating as if the idea wouldn’t have haunted Mollandra all night. “Einsa. Unless Undu’s kept her for one of her experiments. She’s always after the right ingred—”
“She knows.” Tmanga put her hand on Sharp’s shoulder, silencing her. Anyone else would have lost fingers. One day Tmanga might too.
“I’ve heard things,” said Thurli, keeping her voice low. Mollandra had time for Thurli’s opinions. The girl was solid in her thinking, matching her solid body and iron resolve. She’d had a bad leg that had almost killed her, but she’d survived despite the instructors’ indifference.
“Have you now?” Sharp laughed, her eyes challenging the broad-shouldered acolyte.
The towheaded girl ran a hand through the short crop of her hair, eyes hardening as she met Sharp’s gaze before returning her attention to Mollandra. “From that sixth year who’s sweet on me.”
Sharp snorted. Sharp was sweet on Thurli too, and other girls besides, though it never stopped her picking fights.
“She says the Garden gets closer and closer to the shadow lands as you go further back. Might even find your way there, she says. At least, that’s what the sixth years think: it must touch or else how do the monsters get in?
But”—she raised a hand to forestall Sharp’s interjection—“what kills you before you ever see a monster is the fear. It’ll cripple most before they reach the third chamber.
It’s only the true necromancers who can abide it.
They say it’s ghosts. Touching you and such…
” She trailed off, looking earnest, embarrassed, and worried all at the same time.
“Good luck, Mollandra. If she did screw Einsa over, you rip her heart out. Einsa was…”
“She was good,” Tmanga said, surprising Mollandra. “Too good for this place, but she never understood it.”
As they wound down yet more steps, Brooth caught up with Mollandra to offer her own advice.
Mollandra liked the girl. She seemed too compassionate to have lasted this long in the Academy, but she had hard edges too and was good at most things, dealing with the dead especially.
She was also the prettiest of all the year according to Sharp, who would usually intercept her if she approached Mollandra, which rather limited their conversations.
“I made this for you.” Brooth pressed something into Mollandra’s palm.
“Thanks…” Mollandra glanced down. “A…tooth?” A large human tooth with a long root, all of it a strange, almost metallic, grey.
“For the fear,” Brooth whispered, and let Mollandra walk on.
They reached the cavern and Undu walked to the gates with Treecie and Mollandra at her heels.
Treecie had the twitchy look she got when she was scared, but there was a fluid anger beneath it, the same anger that had kept her alive where so many others, seemingly better suited to survival, had fallen.
She was, Mollandra sensed, a fellow weed, harder to kill than she should be.
After all, her family were rich. What were nine bronze marks to her father?
They’d sold her because they’d understood the wrongness in her. Wanted it out of their lives.
Undu produced the largest key from her ring, something heavy and black like the iron of the gates, an object of suitable gravitas for what the acolytes said was a path to any hell you chose.
“Ready?” Undu squinted her doubt at them.
Mollandra eyed the keyhole and imagined Einsa’s last drowning struggle with a different lock, one that Treecie must have sabotaged. “I’m ready.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Treecie said. “It’s not my fault she drowned. I didn’t lock her in the box.”
Part of Mollandra believed the girl. Part of her didn’t care.
If Sharp and Tmanga were going to wear the robes of a Kindness at Mollandra’s side then Treecie had to die.
All the rest of them did. Even so, she would have left it to the Academy to make an end of them if doing so weren’t to say that Einsa failed on her own.
“You jammed the mechanism and you’re going to pay for it. ”
Treecie’s look of fearful apology turned into a snarl in an instant. “You’ll die in there.” She nodded to the darkness beyond the gates that Undu was even now drawing open. “You haven’t got a drop of necromancy in you. The terror will eat you alive. You’ll die screaming.”
Mollandra shrugged. “I’ll tell you a secret, Treecie. There’s something that makes me different from you. From all of them.” She nodded back to the rest of the class, watching with pale faces and wide eyes.
Treecie pretended to ignore Mollandra, but she flinched as the gates clanged back against the walls.
Mollandra spoke softly, just for the two of them. “All of the others were sold here, like you were. I wasn’t.” She drew in a long, slow breath. “I asked to come.”