Chapter 36
Mollandra
Year Five
Mollandra could sense the intruder above her on the roof of the Academy, just as, long ago, she had started to be able to sense Night-Father when he hunted. There was a familiarity to the contact, a certainty that they felt her presence just as she felt theirs.
Day-Father had sent Milk-Eye up the chimney after Mollandra when she made her escape bid. Had he sent her again? Would he send all of her onetime family to drag her back to him? What madness must it take to reach into the Kindnesses’ home and claim what was theirs?
“We could just barricade the doors and let the Kindnesses take care of it.” Tmanga was terrifyingly practical at times.
Mollandra shook her head. “Not one of them saw Father even when he was right out in the open.”
“If he starts kicking the dormitory door in, they probably will.” Tmanga got to her feet, raising her voice to address the other acolytes. “Block that door, ladies, or we’re all going to die, Mollandra’s daddy’s about to arrive.”
“Sounds like a Mollandra-shaped problem to me.” Freeda glanced up from her bed without enthusiasm.
“Why would he kill the rest of us?” Lurgan at least seemed worried.
“You saw what he looked like.” Sharp drew her knife. “He’ll slice your belly just to hear the splat of your guts on the floor. Same as I would. Same as I will right now if you don’t get moving.”
The girls hurried to block the door, even Freeda. Whether they were more scared of Sharp or of the visitors wasn’t clear. They moved beds, breaking splinters from the bed planks to use as wedges.
The intruder didn’t feel like Father, but Mollandra let the idea stand. They had all seen him and understood the threat, or at least felt it crawl over their skin.
As the acolytes worked, Mollandra became aware of more intruders, many more. None of them felt like Father had, these were smaller vortices in the void, carrying some of his terror but less paralysing, at least singularly. Still, if there had been somewhere to run to, Mollandra would have run.
With the beds bracing the door, the acolytes readied their weapons.
All of them had daggers of one design or another, save for Loom, who favoured a weighted club ever since taking the elixir.
She’d surprised everyone by recovering from the burns, but the damage to her hands meant she wouldn’t last long now.
Not that any of them looked like lasting long.
The handle moved silently. Normally it squeaked and the acolytes liked it that way. Whoever was outside had used strange magics to swallow the sound—that or simply injected oil into the mechanism.
Mollandra watched, entranced, as the handle moved up and down.
The first of them to arrive had been joined by three more.
Five new ones moved up the corridor to join those already there: she could feel their presence like fingertips pressed to the surface of her brain.
More came hurrying in bursts of movement, keeping close to the walls, like cats or rats.
These were her brothers and sisters in the life she had escaped.
The children she had abandoned to their fate.
Little had scared her since she joined the Academy.
She had thought that part of her had been broken, the capacity for terror burned out of her at unknown cost. But she found herself trembling now, frightened to see what Mother and Father had wrought of the children she had left behind.
Frightened of the creatures they had twisted her siblings into.
And terrified not so much of their rage or of their hatred, but of the hurt and accusation she might find in their eyes.
The handle turned again, accompanied by a muffled thud. Twice more, slightly less muffled each time.
“We could scream,” Sharp suggested, seeming more amused than scared.
Nobody bothered replying. Night screams were part of the Academy, part of the system by which one hundred became three. No one would come running.
“An instructor will come to look for us in the morning.” Tmanga sat back on her bed, anticipating the wait.
Boom!
The door shook under the coordinated impact of multiple bodies. The acolytes threw themselves against the stacked bedframes, bracing the timbers.
BOOM!
Another blow, this one jolting through the bed that Mollandra had set her shoulder to. Sharp came to stand beside Mollandra, not helping, as if she’d rather those outside were permitted to come in and debate the matter with her. Tmanga joined them, also not helping to support the defences.
“The wedges will hold. You can’t get enough bodies against that door to bludgeon it open. If they’d brought axes, that’d be a different matter.”
Mollandra continued to lean against the stacked beds. “They’ll have brought something.”
Even as she said it, she sensed the invaders stepping back from the door, organizing themselves in some manner. The swirling darkness that she could somehow see in place of each of them, even through wood and stone, seemed to align, the vortex of each matching those around it.
“It’s happening now…” In Mollandra’s mind it was similar to the thing that Undu had taught them only months before in the stench of the catacombs.
Though neither she, Sharp, nor Tmanga had any great skill when it came to necromancy, they could within their trio combine their strengths in a manner that was greater than mere addition.
This joining proved far from easy and Undu had titled their efforts “pathetic,” but they had accomplished feats far greater than any of them could have managed alone.
The key came down to trust, Undu said. Since the only place true trust had even a slight chance to exist inside the Academy was within the confines of a trio, these bonding efforts could never involve more than three acolytes.
This limit clearly did not apply to those who had come for Mollandra.
“Something’s happening…” Gola, the largest and strongest girl in the class—at least of those still alive—stopped straining to hold the door.
All of them could feel it. Something wrong, some kind of offence against nature, dire as necromancy but different, unknown. The door looked changed somehow.
“The hinges.” Mollandra spotted it first. Rust bloomed across the old iron, bubbling up like a pot boiling over, the corrosion eating deep into the metal. Rust flowered and collapsed, flowered and collapsed, raining red to the floor.
BOOM!
The bodies hit close to the hinges this time and the beds, positioned to prevent the normal opening of the door, slid back several inches as the door came out of its frame. Dirty arms reached through the gap, pushing at the obstacles.
Sharp was the first to act, stretching through the forest of legs to jab her knife blade through a reaching hand. Other acolytes followed, but the weight of numbers outside drove the now-unstable blockade back, along with the girls trying to support it.
The children spilling in were younger than Mollandra, some just a year or two shy of her fifteen years, most around twelve.
In the rush, she didn’t recognize individual faces, but she recognized the ragged mass of them all together, she recognized the smell of them.
She had once been part of that terrified, terrifying mass, hounded through the dark spaces of the manor as her parents beat them into something new.
Mollandra’s former siblings broke through the barricades in an awful silence.
Some among them were too small to have been part of the family back when Mollandra escaped.
They came on, giving no voice to their intentions, giving nothing back to the acolytes’ angry challenges.
The determination on their grubby faces held no anger; if anything it was closer to desperation.
They held their blades close in the manner Father had instructed them, thin razors best suited for cutting throats and slicing flesh.
The combat they’d been taught, Mollandra now understood, had been focused on ensuring their enemy died, with little care for their own survival.
Accepting the opponent’s sword or knife in the guts was a tactic that could be used to trap the weapon and allow them to get close enough to open an equally grievous wound in reply.
“You don’t need to do this,” Mollandra shouted. She had been their leader. Cared for them. Protected them. Abandoned them. Just as, in the end, Strong had abandoned her. But Strong was forgotten and she—
“Just her!” The reply, also shouted, came from the corridor beyond. “Just her! She’s all we want.”
Many of the acolytes backed off at that. Jemna, too slow, went down under three of the children in a flurry of blades. It didn’t look like any of them would be getting up again with much blood left, but the numbers were with the intruders and against those still standing with Mollandra.
Scab, the first boy to reach Sharp, got a slash across his face from one corner of his mouth to the corner of the opposite eye. Even so, he nearly managed to grapple her. She twisted away, slicing a small girl’s shoulder and kicking a larger one to the floor.
Tmanga caught a boy’s wrist, broke his arm, and shoved him before her like a shield, stabbing at anyone who came round the sides. Mollandra recognized him as Grumble. His complaints tonight would be short-lived.
Mollandra climbed the unstable pile of beds. Over the past months she’d fashioned a small collection of darts from scavenged nails and timber, making weapons much like the ones Kindness Terra had trained them on.