Chapter 38 #2
Mollandra took Sharp’s hand. Understanding Sharp wasn’t hard, up to a point.
She was an elemental creature, pure as a cat, transparently selfish, recklessly violent.
But fathoms down a secret self lurked, a different kind of soul that seldom spoke but with a conscience and faithfulness that might colour what lay above if stirred with sufficient vigour.
And Sharp herself showed an unexpected ability to cut through pretence and to know by instinct, rather than by intellect, what was true about a person and what was not.
Tmanga, on the other hand, was the weakest link in their chain of trust, the stumbling block when it came to unlocking the power of their trio.
Tmanga might be flesh and blood, but she was also one secret wrapped around another, wrapped around another.
Where the horror of Mollandra’s past had armoured her against the new terrors of the Academy, and where Sharp’s endless shallows had kept their training from touching her too deeply, it was for Tmanga her privacy that had kept her sane.
None of them had seen her true self and all of them knew it.
The instructors had sought to break her but had never done more than scrape away a new layer.
Mollandra laced her fingers with Sharp’s much more pale ones.
She grasped Tmanga’s hand, much darker than hers, and extended both arms towards the dead.
She summoned Sharp onto the backs of her eyelids, flaming and glorious as she had been in the rage whose afterimages had so recently faded.
She painted Tmanga over Sharp, watchful, knowing, calculating.
She placed herself in their hands more fully than merely locking fingers.
Their trio had never properly interlocked, and the fact that none of the others in the class had either was cold comfort.
The barriers that had kept them apart, barriers of mistrust and fear, were the same ones that had kept them alive for nearly five long Academy years.
They lived in a place that punished any square inch of flesh left exposed, and yet to make a trio function they had to do so much more than temporarily lower their guard.
They had worked on it, though. Mollandra had saved Sharp from immolating in her own fire. Tmanga tried to show that something more human lay behind her shields. Sharp still had her edges but was more likely to cut herself than to cut Mollandra or Tmanga.
Strength and focus built, then built again, as if their power were a ball passed between the three of them, back and forth at ever faster speeds, daring any of them to drop it.
Their joined potential passed beyond any effort that they could make alone, surpassing the sum of such efforts.
The rate of increase was slowing, the game of passing becoming ever more difficult, the burden heavier and harder to hold.
The deaths echoed all around Mollandra. Her own blood loss had taken her closer to the river.
Faint, very faint, but louder than she had ever heard them.
The volume of the corpses’ discontent swelled as she heard with Sharp’s ears too, then again as Tmanga’s senses joined hers.
All around them dead hearts strained to beat, some still twitching.
All around them flesh that had been too young to die listened in vain for the commands that would never come.
At least not from the owners of that flesh.
Will stacked upon will, purpose on purpose, desire on desire.
Mollandra didn’t need to open her eyes to know that the bodies had begun to stir.
Not just one or two, but all of them, limbs starting to reach with the urgency of their last moments, violence shuddering through them, their anger like that of Lucia Aqualas Divinanar, ready to fill each of them till their skins burst. The danger and the skill concerned the twisting of that spigot connecting the deadlands to those of the living.
Too small a turn and the departed would barely twitch in death’s consuming sleep.
Too great and their rage—always the first emotion to return—would pour through, creating new foes every bit as dangerous as the ones the acolytes had already fought.
A new idea found root in Mollandra’s head.
Might they turn these creatures on those who had for years tortured and killed their charges?
If the instructors and Kindnesses couldn’t see the children of the manor, who knew what could be achieved?
But on reflection, it seemed more likely that the erasure impacted those closest to them at the time of death and might have had no effect at all on the wider population of the Academy.
Tmanga provided the judgement so absent in Sharp and so conflicted in Mollandra, filtering through just enough anger to animate limbs and restore the instinct to put one foot in front of the next to keep from falling.
The trio’s building strength plateaued, far shy of the multiples the Kindnesses promised. They hadn’t yet reached ninefold their separate strengths, certainly not twenty-seven times, but it had been enough.
Slowly, leaving the fallen acolytes in place, the trio led the way out of the dormitory holding hands, and the dead children followed in a stumbling parade.
“Over the wall,” Mollandra muttered.
It would send more of a message, and besides, there were more doors and gates between the dormitories and the catacombs.
The parade of intruders shambled on, some horribly maimed, one with her head cracked wide, others with a single stab wound.
Along the corridor, past three other dorms, up stairs, another corridor, more stairs.
A door whose lock the children from the manor had already defeated on their way in, and onto the windswept roof.
Mollandra, Sharp, and Tmanga tumbled the dead over the parapet, releasing them from the bondage of necromancy as they fell.
A lone crow looked on. There would be more soon.
Mollandra winced as each corpse thumped the ground far below, feeling anything but victorious.
Most of the children had been at the mansion when she was.
They had followed her lead, and the unspoken bargain had been that she would look after them, never abandon them, never flee her family.
The bodies hit the rocks where the waste from the privy pipes splashed. It wasn’t, Tmanga explained, an act of disrespect but to disguise the stench as they rotted.
“I mean,” said Sharp as they returned to the dormitory, “there’s a bit of disrespect in there too. The fuckers came to our house!”
“They were my family. Our parents, they forced them to do it. The same way the Kindnesses force us.”
Sharp snorted. “You were there when Old Mary told us how babies are made, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” Mollandra said, defensively. “The man puts his—”
“Not the quick bit,” Tmanga joined in. “The slow bit.”
“Three quarters of a year,” Sharp said. “No way one woman squeezed out so many in such a short time.”
Tmanga led the way down the stairs. “I thought you understood this, Mollandra. Those can’t have been your true parents.”
Mollandra nodded. She supposed that the fact she was given to the mansion’s family rather than stolen by the monsters who ruled it was one of the secrets they would need to share if they were ever to combine fully as a trio.
But not today. For today at least, for a little while longer, let them think of her as someone who would need to be taken and not someone who was discarded.
Honesty. Sometimes Mollandra felt she’d rather take a knife to the guts than surrender the truths of her life.
She knew that the three of them had nearly failed to animate their attackers’ corpses.
If there had been just a few more of them, or if they had been just a little older and less full of life, or if they had been a little less angry…
“If we don’t join better, we’re never going to leave this place. ”
“It’s true,” Tmanga acknowledged, pausing on the stairs without looking back at the other two. “It’s also not something I know how to do.”
“Maybe…” Sharp looked speculatively from Tmanga to Mollandra.
“No, Sharp.” Mollandra shook her head in exasperation.
“It’s not that kind of closeness we need.
It works for some trios, but that’s not what ours needs.
And besides—” She spoke over Sharp’s protest. “Sharing a bed isn’t closeness at all, not when you do it.
It’s just fun. A kind of sport. And you know it. What we need is honesty.”
“So, be honest with us, then,” Sharp challenged, as if she knew that while Mollandra’s secrets were not so obviously there as Tmanga’s, she too dragged them behind her like anchor stones bound in many chains.
“I…” Mollandra shut her mouth and passed Tmanga to take the lead.
The stairway still smelled faintly of char, drops of blood visible here and there on the steps.
Mollandra slowed to a halt. “I think…every child imagines at some point that they’ve been stolen away from their real life.
” She spoke hesitantly. More nervous than before any fight with sword or spear under Kindness Terra’s scrutiny.
“Every child imagines that they’re special, chosen, and that the terrible people steering their lives away from what they were supposed to be, those people have somehow replaced the wonderful parents that were taken from them.
“A lot of my brothers and sisters said that, but I think it happens in softer lives too.
Children whose only hardship is the disappointment of not being a prince or princess imagine their dull peasant parents are simply guarding them until the day that the king and queen come to explain the ruse and make everything better.
“But yes.” She raised her hand against a repeat of the logic.
“Yes, we were too many and too different to have the same mother. The two monsters who raised me were not my true parents, and I’m glad of it, though my true parents were not good people.
Even so, born or made, I’m a monster now.
And that’s enough honesty for one night. ”
Without looking back she carried on down the stairs.