Chapter 25 #3
For the space of three or four heartbeats Gane merely looked surprised, smacking her lips as if she had expected more flavour.
In the next moment, as if held in the palm of some invisible giant that had suddenly made a fist, she curled up into a ball of sharp-angled pain.
Every exposed patch of skin turned scarlet, and her growls sounded like those of a trapped animal.
Fumes rose from her hair. The air was filled by the acrid scent of burning.
The acolytes stared in horrified fascination, flinching away as a single flame lit on the back of the girl’s neck.
One flame became a gout of fire, the inferno erupting through Gane’s robes with the ferocity seen in the chemical flares Mollandra had been taught to make.
The girl burned with such violence that chunks of her spat across the floor, prompting Sharp to roll clear.
The cremation caused almost no smoke, as if it were too fierce to allow anything to escape.
Limbs fell away, became bones, and finally a smouldering skull detached from the carcass and rolled a surprising distance, stopping just shy of Tmanga’s feet.
The acolytes watched silently, the stinging air making all of them weep, though any real tears were for themselves and the ordeal that lay ahead.
Undu’s eyes streamed too, though her tears looked more like tears of joy than any form of grief.
“Sharp!” The Kindness held the flask ready.
To her credit, or to the credit of her madness, Sharp showed no hesitation. She used her knife to break away the smoking finger bones still encircling the goblet’s stem and picked it up, pursing her lips as if she had expected it to be hot.
She drank as soon as the draught was poured. Sharp wasn’t one for delay.
“The subject must show control,” Undu declared while Sharp sat back, stunned, eyes wide.
“They must be able to contain the divinity they have been gifted. They must be able to direct the holy rage that comes with it. Failure to do the former”—she paused as Sharp keeled over, clutching her throat and shuddering—“will result in immolation. The rage must be your servant, not your mistress. We need Kindnesses who can direct their anger at the guilty.”
Sharp rolled onto her front, clawing at the floor, her skin starting to smoke.
Mollandra had never really considered the possibility that the Academy would get the better of Sharp.
If any girl was born to be a Kindness, it was surely Sharp.
Watching her struggle, Mollandra understood that she was not prepared to lose another third.
“Sharp! Sharp! Fight it!” Mollandra had to shout to be audible above Sharp’s growling.
Tmanga joined her deep, resonant voice to the effort. “Calm! Be calm. Find your centre.”
Sharp’s roar sent her upwards, as if she’d been punched from below. She rose with the air rippling in front of her lips and pale flame engulfing her hands.
Two things happened at once. One was that Mollandra launched herself at Sharp, and the other was that Tmanga scooped up Gane’s still-smoking skull and threw it at Kindness Terra.
Mollandra hit Sharp’s narrow chest and felled her, wrapping her arms and legs about the girl as they dropped.
The bolt that would have taken off Sharp’s head before Mollandra carried her to the ground hissed past her ear and hammered into the wall.
The skull that had hit the crossbow, fractionally shifting its aim, fell to the ground in a shower of blackened pieces.
Mollandra found herself on the mosaic floor, wrapped around Sharp, who might at any moment burst into flames. Even if she didn’t burn, Sharp might stab her to death in the grip of holy fury. Or, given that it was Sharp, just because Mollandra had knocked her down.
“Hold her still!” Undu leaned over them, a long stiletto in her hand that seemed, impossibly, to have been hidden about her person. She raised the blade aloft. “Hold her head!”
“Try it and I’ll gut you!” Sharp shrieked. “I don’t care who you are!”
Mollandra released her friend as if she were hot, which a few moments ago she had been. Sharp sounded furious, but that was how she always sounded if you riled her. “Don’t kill her! She’s back. She’s under control.” At least as much as Sharp ever was.
Undu paused, her face bulging with something beyond surprise. Shock maybe.
Mollandra, glancing around, quickly saw that not one but three Kindnesses loomed over them, Terra with her great sword drawn from the scabbard on her back.
“Acolyte Sharp?” Kindness Marta enquired, her forgettable face far more sinister than Mollandra could ever recall it looking. “Are you calm?”
Sharp, who looked anything but, gritted her teeth against the cutting answer that anyone else would get and spoke through them. “I. Am. Calm.”
“Remarkable.” The Kindnesses exchanged glances, a moment of unheard-of uncertainty. “You were told not to stand. We will discuss your punishment later.”
“And Tmanga’s,” Terra added.
“And Mollandra’s,” Undu hissed.
“I didn’t stand!” Mollandra discovered she had not finished gambling with her life. Besides, she still had her own draught to take. She was damned if she was going to cower and then burn.
Undu’s smooth brow tightened, rippled by small lines of disapproval. “We will reverse the order.”
And so Mollandra sat and watched as one by one the remaining thirty-plus acolytes ahead of her swallowed their fate.
The start with Sallay, Gane, and Sharp proved to have been unrepresentative of the casualty rate.
Even so, by the time the goblet reached Tmanga nine more acolytes had died, five shot when their rage drove them to their feet, ready to kill anyone within reach; four immolated.
Of the casualties, the one Mollandra liked best, Chancy, became a hot coal, her carbonized skin cracking to reveal fierce orange lines that spread and consumed her, searing her shape into the mosaic.
Denetra, a silent girl from the Rangi, the high desert of the far isle, stayed silent to the end, then literally exploded, sheeting deep red fire across the floor.
Her neighbours, Anamaci and Loom, both needed to be extinguished and received superficial burns.
Bocc was the last to catch fire, and the only one around whom streamers of lightning danced, shattering erratic paths through the mosaic tiles as the girl shook in the grip of unseen forces.
After Tmanga it would be Mollandra, and the initiation would be at an end.
Tmanga took the inky goblet in a hand nearly as dark and swilled the liquid contemplatively before knocking it back.
She spared no last glance for her friends but sat cross-legged, hands gripping her shins, head down beneath its mass of curls.
For several long minutes she sat with no motion save a trembling in every muscle, hands making claws about her legs.
The anger seemed to bleed from her skin, curling Mollandra’s lips into a snarl.
And finally, Tmanga’s head shot back and a single huge cry of rage tore from her throat.
With that it seemed the fury had left her and after panting to regain her breath she passed the goblet to Mollandra, then turned her black eyes towards Undu.
“Acolyte Mollandra.” Undu swung the flask forward.
The liquid hit the goblet with the weight of molten lead, making Mollandra fight to keep her arm steady.
She looked left at Sharp, then right to Tmanga.
It felt for a moment as if Bek and Einsa were standing at her side.
She glanced at the two Kindnesses by the stairs, then up at Undu, wondering whether if she burned she might be able to wrap her arms around the woman and carry her to the floor.
Close up, the elixir’s scent set her heart racing, the blood fluttered through her veins, and her teeth chattered in her head as if she were freezing rather than drenched in her own sweat.
Einsa’s fire—that’s what it was. With a growl of defiance she knocked the stuff back, letting the liquid sear her tongue, then burn its way down her throat.
In that moment a sensation that Mollandra had not felt in many years rose within her: a void opening deep in her core, swallowing the world.
She blinked back the blackness. Wiped her mouth. Looked up at Undu. And, without meaning to, said exactly what was on her mind.
“Fuck you.”