Chapter 21 #2
“You don’t think it would help to know how to find the people we’re sent after?
” Sharp got up lazily. “Tandra-ah’s not the only city, you know.
It’s not even the capital. I don’t know why you act like it’s the whole world.
A little geography is never going to hurt.
Except when it does. But the point is that we’re going to be chasing our targets all over the place.
It’ll help to know where they can and can’t run. ”
Mollandra ground her teeth against a hot reply and followed the other two down the stairs towards the window they’d entered by.
Sharp wasn’t wrong. The Kindnesses didn’t sniff out every crime in person.
Often the misdeeds of the powerful reached the Academy on the currents of trade and gossip that flow through every civilization.
If a queen murdered her son, if a king abused his daughter, if a prince offered the shelter of his hall then slew his guests, these and other crimes would aim a Kindness across whatever distance might need to be crossed.
An involuntary snarl escaped Mollandra’s lips.
She didn’t want Sharp and Tmanga to be right—she wanted them to agree with her.
To share her anger over what had happened to Thurli.
The girl had failed to list the realms and monarchs of Magog.
Instructor Clakka, her anger flaring, had dragged Thurli screaming from the room.
It had been all Mollandra could do to keep herself from trying to stab the woman between the shoulder blades.
If she’d known the punishment Clakka would choose, there was no doubt in Mollandra’s mind that she would have attacked—and died.
Thurli had been put in a cage hanging from one of the five gibbets above the main gates.
The cages were shaped for a person standing, and the iron bands from which they had been fashioned allowed little movement as their prisoners starved while exposed to the elements.
The crow-pecked bodies were eventually moved to the catacombs but stayed long enough to horrify the outside world.
The joke that circulated in the blackest currents of the Academy’s dark humour was that if there was ever a day when at least one of the cages wasn’t occupied, the walls of the Academy would come tumbling down.
Sharp hadn’t been wrong about Mollandra’s ignorance when it came to the wider world.
She had arrived at the Academy having never before left the city.
Her education had ignored the world outside.
It had come as a great surprise to Mollandra that the miles beyond Tandra-ah’s walls, which she had imagined to be an endless carpet of mountain, forest, and field, were in fact almost entirely water, with the great islands of Magog and Gog huddling together for company in the midst of an ocean that dwarfed them both.
Instructor Clakka had also taught them something that could hardly have shocked Mollandra more than if she had told them the world was not the centre and that the stars wheeling overhead weren’t bound on their course around it along with the sun and moon.
She had said that hundreds of miles away, on Gog’s Coast of Bones that runs the length of Carrowland, there were, along with the spines and ribs of great whales and of still greater leviathans, the ribs and spines of vast ships.
Whatever wood composed these skeletons had withstood many centuries of wave and wind.
So many that the subjects of the carvings graven into their ornamentation had escaped humanity’s memory. Creatures and runes beyond knowledge.
There were, the instructor said, stories written between those landings and the present, in languages that modern tongues had twisted away from.
Scholars reported that these tales spoke of demons pursuing the ship-makers across the ocean.
The Kindnesses knew that rather than demons it was the Furies that had chased humanity over the waves, their rage greater than any storm.
The remnants of mankind had fled a calamity of their own making, and while they had been able to outrun the fires in their wake, their guilt could not be so easily outdistanced, not by the crossing of mere distance and time.
Mollandra had first broadened her horizons from the house where she had been born to the city that contained it, and the change had amazed her.
The Academy had pushed those horizons farther.
First, to the coastline of the two great islands that composed the known world.
Then to the vast ocean in which they huddled alone.
And then to some unknown and unreachable foreign shore from which her ancestors had fled in ships that none now could fashion.
She wondered where this process might end.
Where she might find a final boundary within which she was wholly contained and could take stock of her surroundings.
The idea that there might be no such limit unsettled her in ways she could find no words to frame.
All of this pondering was, of course, simply Mollandra’s attempt to push from her mind the fact that Thurli, who had never been anything but decent to her, was now suffering in a cramped cage that would keep her until she died, and then some.
The wonders of the wider world were Mollandra’s allies in not thinking about the horrors of the smaller one which she could reach out and touch.
And greater than the horror of the cruelty that Thurli was enduring was the understanding that Mollandra, Tmanga, and Sharp had just said goodbye to her, each stating clearly to herself and the others that she wouldn’t lift a finger to save the girl.
“I am not, and never have been, a good person.” Mollandra muttered it to herself as she followed Sharp into the dining hall. “Am not. Never have been.”