Storm's Apprentice

The next morning I woke up to dry bedding and clean air. There was none of the constant dampness I was used to from sleeping on the road. There was no smell of animals, no bugs in my clothes, no dirt in my hair, no itching welts on my ankles. The straw in my mattress was poking me in half a hundred places and the room was a bare cell, but it was still the nicest place I’d slept in weeks.

My roommate was already gone when I woke up. He’d left behind nothing but a disturbed straw mat and a pair of dirty underwear lying on the ground. I was obviously going to have to have that conversation with him. The shorts also brought me to the disturbing realization that my roommate, and many of the others, were probably going around in the natural style.

I swung my legs out of bed and stood up. Outside my room, the corridor was dark and cold, and the open sandals they’d given us were doing nothing to keep the chill off my feet. I hurried through the corridor to the common room, hoping there’d be food and a fire.

Inside the large central chamber, I found food, but no heat.

At some point the soldiers had dropped off a sack of oat cakes in one corner. I took one, sniffing it then examining it cautiously. It was made of chewy crushed oats, with black seeds and crushed nuts all baked with . When I’d checked that it was fresh and insect free, I took a bite. It was hard, dense, and bland, but it was no worse than a bowl boiled oats and there was no shortage of them. I grabbed a second and took them to a table.

There were a few other of my fellow captives in the common room. Most of them were drawn in on themselves, still suffering from the trauma of the journey, still missing home, or missing people from home. I knew how they felt. I wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone, and I didn’t think trying would do me any good. One boy with pink skin and wild brown hair broke with the pattern, seeming to by noticeable happy. He caught me observing him and gave me a warm smile. His attitude was almost more off-putting than the others’. What did he have to be so happy about?

I ate my oat cake quietly on my own, thinking about how I could use the day.

We were supposed to be getting our first assignments soon, but they hadn't arrived yet. I didn’t know when or how they'd be delivered, or even if we were expected to go and pick them up from somewhere. Kirkswill didn’t have a college, and the village school kicked you out at age eight no matter how badly you wanted to stay, but it was hard to understand how an educational institute like the academy could be so disorganized.

But just because I didn't have homework yet, didn't mean I had no work to do.

Cordaze had put the resources of the college at our disposal. I was going to use them.

Ignoring their code, the Sovereign’s Path, ignoring their threats and promises, ignoring all of the subtle manipulations I'd noticed and the ones I hadn't, learning to use magic was my best chance at taking ownership of my own future.

If I didn't want to become a sorcerer drafted into a tyrant’s military, or even if I did, then I had to learn everything I could while I was here. I had a healthy maja reserve from a year of peaceful meditation and accumulation. I knew how to accumulate more. If I wanted to actually do anything with it, I needed to study. I’d have to do as the Antorxians did, and take what I needed.

I choked down my first oat cake. It left my mouth too dry to even consider the second, so I stuffed it in my waistband for later. If I didn’t bring something with me, the chances were I’d forget to eat at all.

I passed other students as I moved through the academy grounds. Most were older, men and women in their twenties or thirties. A few were my age or younger. The group I'd arrived with had all looked between the ages of fifteen and twenty, but the students I saw walking around the grounds looked as old as forty. It seemed like you were never too old to become a sorcerer. Or more likely, the Antorxians brought people to be trained here no matter how old they were when they were discovered. I could imagine mothers and fathers with grown children living their whole lives quietly nurturing magical gifts they didn’t understand, only to be swept up and brought here the first time a Reeve passed within sensing distance of their villages.

All of the other students wore gray robes in the same cut but with different shades. The older students seemed to have robes of darker gray, as if they got to wore darker colors the further their studies progressed. I supposed that culminated in the Reeves, who wore black.

Some of them even carried weapons. A tall muscular student in near-black robes carried a large two-handed sword of questionable quality scabbarded on his back. A student with bone-white hair walked past me carrying a short sword in her hand, its naked blade made from some kind of black glossy stone. Quarterstaffs were popular, and at least a quarter of the other students carried daggers of varying quality, sheathed in birch bark, cloth, or leather, and strung through the waistbands of their robes.

I tried to avoid them as I moved around. I even avoided their gazes, looking down or away, rather than at anyone directly.

It amazed me how much Master Cordaze’s demonstration had already affected my way of thinking.

In my own life back in Losiris, I'd have been quick to strike up conversation with any of them, to ask for advice, or for directions, or just to comment on the weather. Community was a strong force in Kirkswill, and nobody would hesitate to call out to someone they recognized, or someone they didn’t. Even insults were thrown and accepted in good humor.

Here and now, Master Cordaze’s sudden, shocking violence was fresh in my memory, and it was intractably linked with her warning against accepting help.

I found myself flinching away from every sharp look.

If there was anyone in that crowd who hadn't taken the Antorxian philosophy on board, I saw no sign of it.

It took about a quarter hour to reach the library. The building didn't stand out from the others in the Academy. The walls were made from irregular stones mortared together, the roof was a row of ancient timbers meeting in an angled peak, with a foot of overhang on each side. The doors were mottled bronze, with a relief of curling vines embossed across them.

It looked crude compared to the military precision of the outer wall, with its square cut slabs and smooth battlements. It made me think of a mountain village or remote monastery more than an imperial academy.

The bronze doors opened at a push. Inside, the building opened up into a bare, deep, dim, empty space. The only feature was a set of steps, descending down into the mountain.

The steps at least matched the Academy walls. They were sharp, straight stones, quarry-cut and precisely placed, leading down into darkness.

The only light in the room came from a pair of lanterns that gave off a cold, blue light, each mounted on top of a pole. The light from them barely reached a few feet down the steps, and no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t take either of the lanterns down from its pole; they were fixed in place.

As I stared first at the lanterns and then at steps, I realized that we were meant to go down them without light. It was like they’d thrown another barrier put between me and what I needed; a minor test, or another tiny trap. Or maybe it was an expression of Antorxian philosophy, to get the good stuff, you have to risk your life.

I wondered how many promising new sorcerers the Antorxian military lost to slips, trips, and falls.

With one hand on the wall, taking my steps very carefully, I moved forward and descended into the darkness.

I'd never in my life seen a real library before. I’d grown up in a small village where the idea of a book was almost an alien concept. If it couldn’t be planted, fermented, eaten, or spun, then nine out of ten Kirkswill residents just didn’t care about it.

Scribe Bevin had owned the biggest collection of books for thirty miles; shelves of farmer’s almanacs, botanical dictionaries, bestiaries, herbals, cookbooks, histories, novels, and astronomical charts, drawers that held cases of pinned insects, sacks of textile samples, boxes of dried plants, and mineral exemplars. Visitors came from all over the five villages to browse it, to ask Scribe Bevin’s advice, and find out what exactly was eating their turnips, but it was still only one man's private collection.

I'd always imagined that a real library would be a bigger version of that. I wanted and expected a room full of packed shelves, rows of neatly organized books, with glass-shrouded lamps and tables for scribe work.

The library at Windshriek Academy had books all right, but that was the only part I'd got right.

Every book sat alone on its own wooden plinth, surrounded by six or more feet of open space. The books had iron shackles riveted to their covers, each spine chained to a metal ring set into its stand so that it couldn't be removed. There would be no taking books away to study in comfort. The only light in the space came from a single blue lantern, held in the hand of a life-size stone statue of a robed woman who sat kneeling on the ground a little way from the stairs, so lifelike I had to poke it in the nose to make sure it wasn't really one of the gray-skinned academy masters.

Past a few feet, the library faded into darkness, exacerbated by slitted fabric dividers that hung from the ceiling at regular intervals, blocking light, muffling sound, and turning the space into a maze of eerie, lightless chambers.

I didn't know if sorcerers quickly learned to see in the dark, or if we were meant to carry our own light sources, as dangerous as that seemed in a library. Maybe forcing us to hunt for knowledge in pitch darkness was another lesson in Antorxian philosophy.

Despite the dividers, the underground space felt huge. The air was cold, dry, and smelled of oiled wood, leather, and calfskin. There could have been a thousand books entombed here, but because of the limited light, I only had access to the handful of them closest to the stairs.

Books weren't the only items down there. Mixed in with them were seemingly ordinary objects. Just in the space lit up by the lantern, there was a cup, a bowl, a hand-mirror, a dagger, a hairbrush, a wooden rod, all positioned with just as much reverence as the books on plinths of their own

They were more than mere decoration, but I didn't know what purpose they served.

I only stood staring for a few seconds, before rushing forward to examine the collection.

The first book I went to was bound in shaved oak, with a sword design block printed on the cover. The pages were linen paper and smelled of beeswax and cedar oil. Opening the cover, the title on the first page declared the book to be The Opening Arts of Arrenshu.

As I leafed through the pages, I realized it was a duelling manual. Every page depicted a fight between a sorcerer in black and a variety of colorful assailants. Each print showed the sorcerer beating their opponent using maneuvers with cheerful names like, Boulder Falls on the Village, and Snake Squirms Free.

I knew that Antorxian sorcerers were as dangerous with weapons as they were with magic, and Arrenshu seemed to be specifically designed with a sorcerer's capabilities in mind. Several of the book's moves involved inhuman leaps and contortions. One of them even required the sorcerer to accept a sword through their own chest to land a strike, which I would have assumed was a fatal proposition for anyone.

I didn't have a sword, and doubted I'd ever be any good with one. Even when I was growing up I was always happier with a book in my hand than swinging a stick at dandelions. When the other village boys were dueling with straight branches, I was always away to the side, drawing letters in the dirt.

The second book I opened was called That For Which We Kill. It was a manual on butchery. Over two hundred pages it explained how to butcher various corporeal spirits and spirit beasts, what parts were valuable, and how they could be safely removed and stored. I learned that the Earth-tremor Toad’s horn was strongly metal aligned, and that the Wilting Wren often had a stomach full of crystalized maja stones. It only hinted at what might be done with any of these gory trophies.

The first few chapters were dedicated to going over the tools that a novice dissectionist should have and how to care for them. I didn't have any tools at all, let alone steel scalpels, glass jars, and gorse flower candles, so the book was of only academic interest to me.

After that I started moving through the books systematically, skimming them enough to get an idea of the contents then moving on.

There wasn't anything like a library index, but I gradually got a feel for the layout.

The martial aspects of the sorcerer's arts were spread out in a gradually widening wedge leading directly away from the stairs. In this area I found the book on Arrenshu, a manual on a dagger fighting style called Forsecare, a book on how to fight using a sharpener buckler, one on different exercise regimes designed to strengthen the body, and one on magical body reinforcement. I spent longest on the last, reading about how a sorcerer could concentrate maja in their limbs to increase their performance, but it assumed too much prior knowledge to be useful to me.

In the quadrant to the left of the stairs were books on spirits and their exploitation. That had been the section where I'd found That For Which We Kill. I also found books on contract design, a spirit bestiary, and even a directory of named greater spirits that a sorcerer might contact using rituals which it mentioned but didn't describe.

They all offered hints, made promises of greater power, with the details only alluded to. If I had any way of reading in the dark, it would have been enough to tempt me out of the pool of light.

To the right were general books on magic as a practice. It was here that I found the most useful book so far.

What the Sky Taught was a book of vellum pages bound in black oak, with a forked lightning bolt of shaved horn lacquered onto the design on the cover.

It was handwritten, and not by someone with a scribe's touch. The text swayed irregularly over the pages, the script alternating in size and clarity as its author's hand grew tired or their emotions grew erratic.

The vellum pages were silky smooth under my fingers, and I felt the same shock that I always had when reading vellum, that this was skin, with its faint animal scent and pores and blemishes. This one even had dark traceries of the original animal’s veins stretching out across the paper.

The text of the book, written in the style of a journal, was a broad overview on the different kinds of magic practiced by sorcerers.

It divided the magical arts into three categories: aspect magic, structured magic, and materials magic.

Aspect magic was the most common type among sorcerers. The mage took some of their bound maja, aligned it with an aspect, like fire, and pushed it from their body in a pattern that would be reflected in the mundane world. The lightning spell Master Cordaze had cast would have been aspect magic.

It made for fast, instinctive spells, limited by the fact that the sorcerer needed a deep understanding of the aspect they wanted to recreate. Or at least an understanding — everyone had their own unique relationship with a given aspect.

The book helpfully offered a ritual for gaining access to the Fire aspect. All I'd have to do was prepare a brazier with the right fuel, oils, and meditations, and plunge my hand into the flames until I needed urgent infirmary treatment.

I knew I'd have to make progress in aspect magic eventually, it was a sorcerer's mainstay, but at the same time I wasn't in a hurry to fry my fingers like sausages.

Materials magic involved making use of spiritual components; using spirit organs or maja-infused plants in alchemy, crafting fetishes and imbuements from parts of spirit beasts, even implanting Fold-touched tissues into the sorcerer's own body. I felt like That For Which We Kill would have been useful for someone practicing materials magic.

That field might have appealed to me, as all crafts did, but I had none of the tools I needed, none of the components I needed, and no way to get either.

The category that really appealed to me was structured magic.

Structured magic existed in the realm of symbols and diagrams, grammars, geometries, and crisp lines meeting at precise angles. It was a realm I was familiar with.

A cantogram was a magically significant diagram that resonated with an aspect of the Fold. When it was properly drawn out in maja, it would snap, and invoke whatever effect it was associated with.

The most accessible way of drawing out a canto was drawing it in free maja in the air, using a technique called misting. All I'd need to do was channel maja to my finger and emit it in a stream as I drew out the design.

But despite being the most accessible, it wasn't the eaisest. Free unaligned maja was invisible, so I wouldn't be able to see my work as I sketched it. It would be like writing while wearing a blindfold.

In addition, the air was a very unstable medium, so any design placed into it would very quickly lose its shape. And as someone whose first writing had been fingerpainted letters on a wall, I knew that a finger was a crude drawing tool, especially compared to the delicacy and finesse of a canto.

There were equipment and materials that could make it easier. Maja-infused ink, wires spun from magically-infused metal, or a spirit stylus could all help in the creation of cantos embedded in physical items, but I didn't have ink, or wire, or any tools at all.

But as long as the only thing between me and making use of this form of magic was practice and study, I told myself I'd be able to do it.

What the Sky Taught included the canto ‘Winter Hearth’ as an example, which would create gentle warmth in the space it was created, but would also dim light in the area. Apparently most cantos had multiple effects, and part of the art of them was balancing and mitigating trade-offs. Cantos with pure effects were rare enough to be considered family or even national secrets.

Even a canto as simple as Winter Hearth was dauntingly complex. A double circle, filled with a pattern of about fifty lines, interior curves, and characters from an alphabet I didn't recognize.

Memorizing it would be like trying to memorize the schematics of a cathedral, but I tried anyway.

I pictured the diagram as if it were a maze I was walking through, making myself see the turn-offs and their angles, telling myself the story of my journey through its elaborate branches.

Memorizing it took the bulk of the time I spent in the library.

My legs were aching and my eyes were gritty by the time I decided I wasn't making any more progress. I rubbed my hand over my face and closed the book in front of me

Out of nowhere, I felt a shiver run across my skin.

The hairs on the back of my neck and my arms rose up, as if a chill had just swept over me. I felt like I was being watched.

I jerked my head around, looking for the source of the feeling.

I froze when I saw someone watching me from the edge of the light.

It was a woman, standing about thirty feet away, mostly hidden by one of the fabric partitions. The only part of her I could see was a dark-haired head, peering around the corner on the end of a long, elegant neck.

She was a few years older than me, with pale skin rashed with black spots that made me think of decay. Tar-black hair framed her face, falling down and around her head in a way that made it look like she was surfacing from dark water. Most of her body was hidden, but I could see the neckline of a white robe at the edge of the divider. White. The masters wore black, the students wore gray, so who wore white?

She was staring at me with a completely empty expression, like the face of a doll. She was smiling at me, but her eyes didn't even seem to be focused.

I stood there for a few seconds, feeling suddenly weak, listening to the blood pumping in my ears.

“Hello?” I said.

The girl took a step forward, out from behind the divider. There was something wrong with the way she moved.

She was abnormally tall, seven or eight feet at least, except she walked hunched over with her head hanging below the level of her shoulders, like the haunches of a vulture. Her legs were long and bent, never fully straightening, and her long arms, like the spindly limbs of a young tree, hung down close to the ground. She barely seemed human any more, if she’d ever been.

As she took another step toward me, I recognized another feature of her face. What I'd thought was a shadow on her forehead was actually a scar; a straight line, thin and precise, running down through the center of her forehead from her hairline to the bridge of her nose. Two deep divots sat on the left side of it, as if her head had been pricked by a carving fork while the central cut had been made.

She took several more slow steps toward me, smiling her hollow smile the whole time.

“Hello?” I said again. I took a few steps backwards to maintain the distance.

She brought up one of her over-long forearms and waved at me in an exaggerated motion, her hand making wide arcs through the air, like the wave of an over-enthusiastic child.

I felt the urge to run. I wanted to turn around and sprint out of the library, up the stairs, and out into the open air. But I knew that if I did that now, I'd never come back. Whenever I thought of the library I'd always imagine that this stretched woman was waiting for me down here, in the dark. The place that should have been my salvation would be cut off from me.

Instead I stepped forward. I did what Scribe Bevin had taught me to do in the face of clients who refused to pay, and stood up straight, squared my shoulders, and spoke directly to her.

“Madam, please stop there until we've introduced ourselves.”

The words felt fake in my mouth, but the woman stopped. Her expression didn't change.

“Hello,” she said after a few seconds. She spoke with difficulty, like the word was something she had to dredge from memory and deliberately enunciate.

“Who are you?” I asked

After a while, she replied. “I am Ba.”

“Ba,” I repeated.

I wasn't familiar with it as a name. I only knew it in the context of language, as the second letter of the Old Irisian alphabet.

“I'm Dorian,” I said.

A second later, the sound of footsteps on stone came from the same direction that the tall woman had come from. Another woman emerged from the shadows.

The newcomer at least had normal human proportions. She was shorter than me by about a foot, with olive skin and deep red hair.

She stopped when she saw me, then looked between me and Ba. She gave me a long, distrustful stare, before she resumed walking toward the stairs. She called to Ba sharply as she passed.

“Ba, come.”

Ba immediately lost interest in me and followed after her.

I moved to keep the distance between us as they walked past, heading for the stairs. As they started climbing, I overheard the other woman speaking to Ba in a lower voice.

“In future, don't speak to anyone other than me.”

“Yes,” Ba replied in the same halting way as before.

“Only my orders are to be obeyed.”

“Yes.”

I stayed still, listening until their footsteps had disappeared beyond the top of the stairs. Feeling confused and slightly disturbed, I hung back until I was sure they were gone.

Over a couple of minutes my heart calmed down and my alarm turned into confusion.

The second woman had obviously been a student, but what did that make Ba? The student had spoken with the tone of a master speaking to a servant. Did the students here have their own staff? Did they keep slaves? Slavery wasn't a crime that the Antorxians were known to commit, but I couldn't ignore the absolute deference Ba had shown.

When I was sure I wouldn’t run into them at the top, I started up the stairs myself.

It was night when I emerged from the library. The sky had transformed into a depthless velvet curtain, twinkling with the lights of a million heavenly bodies far above. I’d heard that the stars were greater spirits, blazing with power in their void-strewn domains. I’d also heard that they were distant suns with worlds of their own. Scribe Bevin hadn’t known the truth for sure. The only people who might know were powerful priests and mages who dealt with the greater spirits, or the truly legendary mages who were said to have left the confines of the terrestrial world. It was beyond my knowledge as an apprentice scribe, or as a novice sorcerer.

The mountainside felt just as cold as the void above me. An icy wind blew down from the peak, billowing the grasses and rattling the roof tiles of the buildings nearby. It almost knocked me off my feet when I stepped out of the shelter of the building, and it did take my breath away.

I staggered away from the library along the dirt road that led back to our barracks.

On the way I tried to put Ba and her master out of my mind, concentrating on consolidating what I'd learned about cartograms and structured magic.

Soon, I'd be confronted by the first of the tests that the masters would assign to us, but for now, I hoped that I had time to experiment with this new kind of magic.