Had this been any other division of the Imperial Academy, her family would have been asked for a large donation, or she would have been expelled. But this was a school for sorcerers, and they were determined to keep her until she died.
Arienne stood before the iron door in the middle of the main hall. The passage leading deep down to the Power generator chamber was said to be rigged with wards and traps. There were rumors of Powered weapons guarding the passage, and the tales first-year students would hear between classes were even more sensational, involving monsters and spirits the Empire had captured in its myriad conquests. Arienne imagined herself hanging by her fingertips over a dark wailing pit lined with hungry bestial eyes, a companion trying to get her to reach out and grab their hand. But as she stood there, about to break one of the deadliest rules of the Imperial Academy, she had no such companion with her. This gave her pause.
Well, she did have an accomplice. Of sorts. The voice that had suggested all this to her. But it had been silent ever since she left Felix in his room.
Arienne slathered both the lock and the key with olive oil from a bottle so slick that half of its label had peeled off. She applied a generous amount to the hinges and the doorframe as well. She tucked the bottle back into her inner pocket and wiped her hands on her student’s robe. She smelled spoiled oil and the tang of rustas the key turned in the lock with a muted clang. Oil dripped to the stone floor as she pushed the door open, and every drop seemed to echo in the deep, deep silence. She stared into the unlit stairway that led to the generator chamber, afraid of taking the step that would make everything irrevocable.
Every student in this school knew what fate awaited them. The Power generators that sustained the whole Empire were made from the bodies of dead sorcerers. These generators lit up the cities at night, drew up water from the rivers, and enabled the Empire’s weapons to wreak havoc upon the world. In a world conquered by the Empire, sorcerers were no longer astonishing beings that shook the heavens with mysterious spells. They were now more useful dead than alive. And the students at the Imperial Academy’s Division of Sorcery were nothing more than living corpses herded together to await their deaths.
Most students numbed to their eventual fate after their third year or so. What the Empire chose to do with their corpses happened after they were dead, after all. Most would be content to live out their lives, as the sorcerer on the lowest pension rank still fared better than the average Imperial citizen.
The day after she had flunked her fifth year, Magnus, an honors student with the most beautiful hair, had offered to tutor her, either out of pity or an inborn friendliness so common to scions of prominent families. Arienne had asked the prodigy sorcerer what spells he could teach her. Naming a handful of minor convenience spells he had learned from his classmates, Magnus looked puzzled as to why he was being asked such things. He reminded her that their formal education was about preparing them for their service after death, and sorting out the students who would serve the Empire in life as sorcerer-engineers or professors, the former of which he aspired to be. He was going to travel the world as an attendant engineer to the best of all the hundred legions. He looked proud when he said it was his birthright and destiny. Arienne refused Magnus’s offer with a polite smile. Magnus, taken aback, made an awkward compliment about the tattoos surrounding her neck. She didn’t explain to him that they weret’laran,clan markings all Arlanders had. After that conversation, she altogether avoided talking about the school, sorcery, or her future.
Arienne didn’t have the drive necessary to become an engineer or a professor. Neither did she have the good sense to make peace with her assigned fate. She had no way of escape, and no one to confide in.
But in the winter of her fifth year, just before a new term, she began to hear the voice—the voice that had now returned and was reminding her why she chose to stand in front of this forbidden door.
“Why are you hesitating? Did you not tell me you loathed to become a Power generator? That you feared a meaningless life and endless death above all else? Descend.”
The voice was right. She gritted her teeth, then walked down the dusty spiral staircase. The soft brush of her leather slippers against the stone steps echoed against the invisible wards, sounding like a dozen whispers in the dark.
This year, her sixth since entering the Academy, Arienne had placed first in her class. The last time a sorcerer from a province and not an old heartlander family achieved such an honor was twenty years ago. In another division of the Academy, this would have been enough to arouse suspicion, but as a student of sorcery,she was simply congratulated as a late bloomer who would make a decent Power generator after she died. A professor even suggested to her that she might want to take extra courses to be a sorcerer-engineer, citing her academics scores.
Duff, a custodian of the dorms, was as overjoyed as if he’d placed first himself, and bought her a cake. Duff was a burly, middle-aged Ledonite man whose bald head reminded Arienne of the baker who had made the farewell cake back in Arland. He treated young Arienne from his homeland’s neighboring province of Arland like a niece, which always made Arienne uncomfortable. As a sorcerer, she was an asset of the Empire. It didn’t matter where she was from. A man acting like he was family—when he wasn’t even from her province but from a neighboring one—did not sit well with her.
Not to mention, she hadn’t exactly placed first on her own. Her marks this year had little to do with her prowess as a student and everything to do with the voice in her head.
When the voice first made itself known, she’d assumed it was a prank being played by one of the other students who had picked up an amusing spell somewhere; her boyfriend, Felix, for one, had been reprimanded a few times for such mischiefs. But the voice was neither male nor female, young nor old. The voice knew all sorts of things that no one should know: stories of Arienne’s childhood; the illicit relationship between a professor and a student; the code that briefly dissolved the ward around the safe where the sixth-year exam results were held; the hour of the night in which old Quintus, the guard who kept watch over the safe, would inevitably drift off to sleep; and in the same room, on a dusty shelf, a forgotten wooden case that held the key to the basement…
“Young sorcerer, you still recall the unraveling codes I told you?”
“If I forget you can tell me again,” muttered Arienne, answering the voice for the first time since slipping out of her dorm.
Her foot unexpectedly landed on an invisible surface instead of a step, making her stumble. A rune glowed in the air beneath her feet, creating pale waves like the surface of a pond reflecting the moon. Inhaling deeply, she backed up from the ward and recited the code of unraveling in one breath.
The mist of her breath turned violet and sparkled. Like the smoke from a hearth being drawn up a chimney, her breath flew down to the pale waves, melting into them and diminishing their glow. She stepped forward, confident the remaining four wards would be just as easy to unravel with the codes the voice had given her.
Once she had topped her class by forging the exam results, Arienne was no longer skeptical of the voice. Whatever its intentions, it clearly existed, and everything it spoke was true.
Magnus, coming in second this year, had kept asking Arienne how she had done it. His smile was cold, as if in recognition of the upstart provincial as a serious contender. Arienne had no desire to entertain any rivalry. She had another, more important matter occupying her mind.
The voice made promises, that it would help her escape the school, teach her real sorcery. The voice had a price, however. She was to sneak into the underground levels of the Division of Sorcery’s main hall and extract a Power generator.
Only the Empire’s sorcerer-engineers knew how to build the Power generators, and they were granted this knowledge only at the Imperial Academy. It was this monopoly of Power that madethe Empire’s conquest of the world possible. From the weaker generators that lit the streetlamps and purified the waters to the stronger ones that animated the massive gigatherions for war, each generator was the possession of the Empire. Stealing one was a crime so serious that execution was theleastamount of punishment one would receive.
The Power generator would be encased in a coffin made of lead to prevent the leakage of Power. Because it contained the remains of a sorcerer, it would be as large as an ordinary coffin. Its weight, however, was bound to be significant, even without the heavy control chains it would also be wrapped in. But the voice had taught Arienne a way to move it, a strange sorcery her books had never even mentioned.
Having cleared all five wards, she had started down a small final staircase when her eyes glimpsed a skeleton lying at the bottom with its neck snapped in two. She stumbled backward in surprise, sitting down on a step. A mouse poked its head through of one of the skeleton’s eye sockets and peered in her direction.
Arienne whimpered as the mouse scrambled across the skull and down the frayed student’s robe wrapped around the lifeless bones, before leaping off and slipping through a crack in the wall. After a moment, she got to her feet and continued down the stairs, the skull grinning up at her as she approached.
Staring at the skull, she remembered Magnus’s face when he found out she had placed first in the exams. She could have a future like Magnus’s now, if she worked harder. In contrast, the skeleton served as a reminder of the wholly different future she was likely to meet at the end of her chosen path if she wasn’t careful.
Arienne shook away the thought and approached the skeleton.Just as the voice had said, there was a key in a sleeve pocket of the dead student’s robe. There was also a small notebook, scribbled with the kind of things a Division of Sorcery student might be concerned with. The last entry was dated five years ago. Had it been that long since a living soul had entered this space?
Beyond the skeleton, there was another iron door before her, a big old thing that would require much strength to open, even if she managed to unlock it. She took out her bottle of olive oil once more and smeared the key, pouring it onto the keyhole as well.
Like ice gliding on ice, the door opened silently. A narrow corridor waited before her.
