Chapter 25
Mollandra
Year Five
In Year Five when the class had shrunk to three dozen, Kindness Undu introduced the survivors to the elixir.
Mollandra had been expecting another session with the mouldering bones of former acolytes.
Some of the girls could work wonders, though none were as good as Treecie had been.
Sallay could tell you whose bone she held, and maybe something about them.
Brooth could make a little homunculus from the smallest bones of fingers and feet, and set it walking the perimeter of the table.
The things had something of the insect about them and made Mollandra want to scream.
Instead, Undu took them down a spiral stair they had never seen before, unlocking heavy iron gates at four different places, and waiting in a small alcove for all the girls to pass so she could lock all the gates after the last acolyte.
The girls expected some new atrocity to be waiting for them in the depths.
Some method to thin the herd still further, born from the sickness of a diseased mind.
A strange stink entered the air as they circled downwards.
Not the pervading rot of the catacombs but something almost spicy—such flavours being known to Mollandra only from Instructor Jane’s poisons, some of which needed to be hidden behind a strong taste.
“So, did Einsa tell you about this one?” Mollandra posed the question to the back of Tmanga’s and Sharp’s heads, still not entirely reconciled to the idea that Einsa had shared things with either of them that she had not spoken about to her.
“Not me,” Sharp said.
The scent grew stronger the deeper they went, setting Mollandra’s teeth on edge and filling her with restless energy.
And suddenly she knew what strange perfume filled her nostrils.
She had mentioned Einsa and perhaps it had been the scent—ever the path to memory—that put the girl’s name on her tongue.
This had been what she’d smelled in the steam above Einsa’s watery grave.
This had been what lingered in the aftermath of her final fury.
Farther back, infected by the secondhand anger in the air, Sallay began bickering with Gane, which was always a stupid thing to do in Undu’s classes even if she was at the other end of a spiral.
The stairs terminated against the side of a vault with a high roof and circular floor.
An extensive mosaic covered the ground, its design unfurling and colours deepening as Undu walked the perimeter lighting candle after candle in niches around the walls.
Decoration was almost unheard of in the Academy.
The Academy, via the Kindnesses, claimed whatever took their fancy from the corpses of the guilty, as well as one tenth of any wergild paid under their supervision.
Those riches were not spent on the fort, at least not where the acolytes could see it.
Whether that wealth flowed back out into the world to fund secret projects, or lay heaped in neglected piles in the Academy vaults, Mollandra had yet to learn.
On the wall opposite the stairs was a large circular iron door with a wheel-driven locking mechanism set at its centre. Undu returned to this door after lighting the candles.
“Sit. Make a circle. Make sure there’s nobody closer than two yards to you.”
The Kindness set her bloated white hands to the spokes of the wheel and applied her strength—which Mollandra knew to be remarkable—to turning it. Metal ground against metal and the wheel rotated. After several revolutions Undu heaved back, leaning into the action.
The woman weighed as much as any three of the acolytes arrayed around the chamber, but even so the door responded with almost imperceptible slowness, stealing into motion over the course of five measured breaths.
Mollandra would have remarked on its thickness had either of her neighbours been close enough to whisper to. At least eight inches of black iron sealed the entrance.
The Kindness disappeared into the shadows beyond the door, her strange, gliding walk carrying her from sight.
Time passed, and the acolytes watched each other in the dance of candlelight.
Sharp amused herself making faces at the girls she liked and at the ones she didn’t.
Of late more of the acolytes found comfort in each other, but Sharp had never approached Mollandra or, to her knowledge, Tmanga.
Probably she sensed that neither sought that kind of company.
In her first years Mollandra had ached for the simpler kind of love shared between sisters, between a mother and her daughter.
She knew it existed despite what her short life had taught her, and without even understanding what she was doing she had reached for it as any green thing will reach out for water even in the parching heat.
Bek and Einsa had cured her of the need for such affection.
By dying. Love, even the rough affection Einsa had shown her, was a wonderful thing.
But the price lay beyond what Mollandra could afford to pay.
Tmanga closed her eyes and rested her hands on her knees, legs crossed.
Mollandra watched the vault entrance, wondering what might need such protection here in the depths of the Academy’s substructure.
She felt unaccountably annoyed, her usual gnawing anger at their lives now supplemented by something more febrile, flickering like the flame.
The scream that lived in her chest wanted out.
The shifting light made strangers of her fellow acolytes, girls she had known for years now, casting their faces into new relief.
She saw their hunger, the violence lying just beneath their skin, the sharp questions in their eyes as they glanced this way and that.
“Still alive, I hope?”
Everyone turned as Kindness Undu reemerged, holding before her a pair of iron tongs that in turn gripped a long-necked flask. Although the fluid in the flask’s round belly had not glowed in the darkness of the vault, the candles’ light found a deep crimson answer in the swirl within.
“Did I remember to say to ‘study the floor’? I hope so. It will be important.”
Thirty-six pairs of eyes immediately began to hunt the designs tiled around them.
Geometric patterns, scrolling waves, chasms, fire, the spirits of the wind cracking their cheeks.
All omens of disaster. There, one of the Kindly Ones riding a lightning-wheeled chariot through boiling clouds, hair aflame.
Mollandra almost didn’t see the goblet. At the centre of the circle the acolytes had made, following the symmetries of the design, lay a black almost-circle, a gyre of darkness, picked out in nail-sized tiles of ceramic, an area nearly a yard across.
The black goblet stood at the centre of the gyre, camouflaged.
Undu set the flask on the mosaic, keeping her distance as if it had just been drawn from the furnace mouth.
“There are stories of occasions when our kindness becomes something…less kind.” She spoke in her strange, lilting child’s voice.
“There are stories of times when a sister becomes a thing of legend, touching the very skirts of the Furies themselves.”
Around the circle sharp breaths were drawn. That name was seldom spoken.
Undu smiled, a rare act that showed her years, counted in the lines where the crow set its foot to the corners of her eyes.
“In this vault it would be a sin not to speak of the three, of the Furies, they who punish gods. We must name them. Alecto, our patron, unceasing in anger. Tisiphone, the avenger. Megaera, the keeper.”
When Alecto’s name passed Undu’s lips the crimson flame within the flask broke free and for a heartbeat burned across the glass.
As the fire drew back Mollandra found herself rising to her feet, fists clenched as tight as her belly, teeth bared, challenging the others, all of whom seemed on the point of racing across the circle to rend their opposite number.
“Sit,” Undu commanded.
Tmanga was the first to obey. She sat heavily, unclenching her hands, the deep furrows of a frown spreading across the customary smoothness of her brow.
“There are stories of our kindness becoming something else,” Undu repeated. “Even before the founding of this academy, when our cult ran wild, springing up here and there like fire in the drylands, the records show occasions when divinity laid its hand upon a sister.
“Seven hundred years ago it is said that the princes of Themda denied Kindness Heera at their gates, and on high walls a thousand archers strained their bows.
So great was her fury that it lifted her feet from the ground, blew the great bronze gates of Themda from their hinges, and sent lightning flying faster than any arrow to strike down those who raised their hands against her.
“Kindness Kretr, in the time of the northern fall, sought out the coin-lord in his high tower only to find the True Guard arrayed to block her path. The ruin she smote among those paladins that day brought an end to the order. Bones and smoke and blackened armour—nothing else remained.
“Twelve years ago, on the islet of Yoth, Kindness Terra’s true sister, Kindness Ome, went to bring judgement against Agga Manda, the pirate lord, rapist, eater of children, salter of fields, murderer of guests.
Kindness Ome did not return, but no ship has flown the black claw since, and grass has yet to grow again on Yoth. ”