“Arienne! Arienne!”
It was Duff, the custodian of the dorms, pushing through the crowd to get to her. Following him were students in Academy robes. Arienne suddenly remembered she was still wearing her own robes and was very noticeable to those who would be looking for her.
She hadn’t expected to be found out by the Academy this quickly, but seeing as it was just Duff and some students, they must not have reported her to the Office of Truth just yet. Maybe the Academy did not want a public incident on their hands. It occurredto Arienne that there was a slight chance that if she got caught now, all she would have to endure was a scolding and two months’ detention in her dorm room. Shivering and bone-tired as she was, the vision of her bed and having no reason to leave it was so tempting it momentarily overwhelmed her senses.
But such a fate would never do—she could not go back to the days of feeling like a living corpse. She would not accept the fate of being wrapped in bandages and enclosed in a cold lead coffin for eternity; she’d pour oil over her body, set herself on fire, and become a handful of ash before allowing herself to be dragged back to that life. That would be a warmer, quicker death.
She turned and ran as fast as she could in the other direction. Duff used his large bulk to push aside the marketgoers, making way for the robed students and paying not an iota of attention to the curses that followed him.
“But think of what a good student you are—”
Duff, although out of breath and panting between words, was getting closer and closer. Something tugged at Arienne’s robe, tearing it, but when she looked back it wasn’t Duff but a nail on a cart that had snagged her.
“Stop, I say! Let’s talk!”
But as he said this, there was a flash of violet light and a crate of apples broke open behind Arienne. The fruit seller stepped back in surprise, and Arienne, glancing over her shoulder, saw Duff step on an apple and lose his balance. He yelled out to the students following him.
“Idiots! Are you trying to catch her or me?”
The exploding crate must have been Titus, a fourth-year who always bragged about how he knew a real combat spell, when allhe could do was break a chair leg or a wooden bucket. When she had pointed this out, he argued that he could kill everyone on a speeding carriage if he broke a wheel spoke.
Duff liked his drink and was on the heavyset side. His face had already turned bright red from exertion. Despite this, the distance between them was closing fast. Arienne did not bother to look back anymore and concentrated on running as fast as she could through the crowded market square.
“Why are you running like an ordinary girl? Act like a sorcerer!”
She shouted back at Eldred, “Then why don’t you do something yourself!”
Suddenly Arienne’s robe was pulled taut from behind and she nearly fell. She looked back to see Duff holding on to a handful of her hem, the length of his body against the ground. The sorcery students, the Academy-prescribed exercises not designed to do anything for their physical performance, were panting as they pushed through the crowd, still a distance away. Duff gave her a murderous look as he caught his breath. “You wicked wench, your running away will kill us all!” His panting words came out as a mist in the cold air.
Duff tried to get up but fell again. Arienne used this opportunity to twist and kick him in the head, almost falling down herself. Duff grunted but held on to her robe. Normally taking off the student’s robe would be as easy as throwing off a used towel, but Duff’s pull turned the garb into a tight lasso. The exhausted students behind her started to run once more.
“You can do it,”Eldred said.“Cut off your clothes and run, even you can do this.”
She could feel Duff’s hot breaths on her heels, and the eyesof the people of the market gathering around them. Instinctively, Arienne focused on the robe she had put on for every day of the past six years, trying to imagine a single thread that might or might not exist, a single thread that held the whole robe together. Then she imagined the words, the words that had never before passed her lips, syllables that she had never even known existed. The incantation escaped her mouth and a strength came to the tip of her tongue. An unseen knife sliced through the imaginary thread.
The front of her robe split like the carapace of an emerging cicada, and she slipped out of it in the white linen dress she wore underneath.
Duff, exhausted, could only grasp at the abandoned robe and try to catch his breath. Arienne fled into the maze-like alleys.
Once she had shaken Duff and the students off, Arienne hid in a dark alley by Lukan’s tavern and waited for the customers to leave. It was a good thing she had left behind her school robe, but now she was freezing with only the linen material of her dress to shield her. She was so afraid of being spotted she dared not enter any establishment. She had not eaten all day or slept the night before during her escape from the Academy, and her dress and shoes were filthy from wandering the city’s dirty alleys.
Why hadn’t she realized that the customers who were going to and from the tavern would pass by her in this alley? They looked her up and down, this loiterer in her unseasonable outfit, some deranged woman who was surely the talk of the tavern by now.A stupid choice,thought Arienne grimly.
The Academy must’ve given up on trying to handle this quietly and reported her to the Office of Truth by now. If the Officenoticed the absence of the Power generator, they would eventually realize that Arienne hadn’t run away on her own. The inquisitors would be after her then.
She imagined herself tied to a rack and being tortured by the inquisitors. The rack in her imagination was cross-shaped. The inquisitors wore black headcloths and held tongs, the kind used in fireplaces. What the inquisitors would ask and how she would reply, she couldn’t think up. How little she knew about the situation she found herself in, a situation ironically of her own making.
The Office of Truth did not generally approve of sorcerers—dead sorcerers were useful as Power generators that would contribute to the glory and prosperity of the Empire, but living ones were rather less controllable. At the Academy, the inquisitors of the Office were spoken of as if they were ghosts. They came silently, and people would disappear, never to be heard from again. Arienne didn’t know a single sorcerer who had been taken by the Office of Truth. Somehow, this ignorance spawned even more terrifying imaginings.
To get away from the torture chamber and inquisitors of her imagination, Arienne focused on the old room she had in her mind, entering it and closing the door behind her. Her consciousness was in the room, where it was warm, but the cold of the reality around her body didn’t abate one bit, which gave her an odd feeling. Eldred sat on the edge of the bed with his head down, just as before.
She stood before the shelf her mother had made for her and took down a book, an adventure story she had read as a child. She couldn’t even remember the name of the main character. She startedreading it, her childhood memory coming back as she retraced the daring deeds of an Imperial merchant. But if she had forgotten all about the book, how could she have imagined its contents? Puzzled, she put the book back and noticed there was a book with a yellow leather cover lying on the bed beside Eldred.
The Sorcerer of Mersia.That was the title stamped on the cover.
Mersia. The province that had declared its freedom from the Empire only to be extinguished by a legendary Powered weapon. A weapon called the Star of Mersia. But that had been a hundred years ago, and felt more like a myth than a real piece of history today. Had such a book existed in her house? There was a smaller title stamped below the big one, but the gilt had flaked off and it was difficult to make out. Arienne stared at it, trying to make sense of the remaining letters.
Then, in the real world, something tapped her shoulder. She almost jumped out of her skin.
