Page 54

On the wall opposite the stairs was a large circular iron door with a wheel-driven locking mechanism set at its centre. Undu returned to this door after lighting the candles.

“Sit. Make a circle. Make sure there’s nobody closer than two yards to you.”

The Kindness set her bloated white hands to the spokes of the wheel and applied her strength—which Mollandra knew to be remarkable—to turning it. Metal ground against metal and the wheel rotated. After several revolutions Undu heaved back, leaning into the action.

The woman weighed as much as any three of the acolytes arrayed around the chamber, but even so the door responded with almost imperceptible slowness, stealing into motion over the course of five measured breaths.

Mollandra would have remarked on its thickness had either of her neighbours been close enough to whisper to. At least eight inches of black iron sealed the entrance.

The Kindness disappeared into the shadows beyond the door, her strange, gliding walk carrying her from sight. Time passed, and the acolytes watched each other in the dance of candlelight. Sharp amused herself making faces at the girls she liked and at the ones she didn’t. Of late more of the acolytes found comfort in each other, but Sharp had never approached Mollandra or, to her knowledge, Tmanga. Probably she sensed that neither sought that kind of company. In her first years Mollandra had ached for the simpler kind of love shared between sisters, between a mother and her daughter. She knew it existed despite what her short life had taught her, and without even understanding what she was doing she had reached for it as any green thing will reach out for water even in the parching heat. Bek and Einsa had cured her of the need for such affection. By dying. Love, even the rough affection Einsa had shown her, was a wonderful thing. But the price lay beyond what Mollandra could afford to pay.

Tmanga closed her eyes and rested her hands on her knees, legs crossed. Mollandra watched the vault entrance, wondering what might need such protection here in the depths of the Academy’s substructure. She felt unaccountably annoyed, her usual gnawing anger at their lives now supplemented by something more febrile, flickering like the flame. The scream that lived in her chest wanted out. The shifting light made strangers of her fellow acolytes, girls she had known for years now, casting their faces into new relief. She saw their hunger, the violence lying just beneath their skin, the sharp questions in their eyes as they glanced this way and that.

“Still alive, I hope?”

Everyone turned as Kindness Undu reemerged, holding before her a pair of iron tongs that in turn gripped a long-necked flask. Although the fluid in the flask’s round belly had not glowed in the darkness of the vault, the candles’ light found a deep crimson answer in the swirl within.

“Did I remember to say to ‘study the floor’? I hope so. It will be important.”

Thirty-six pairs of eyes immediately began to hunt the designs tiled around them. Geometric patterns, scrolling waves, chasms, fire, the spirits of the wind cracking their cheeks. All omens of disaster. There, one of the Kindly Ones riding a lightning-wheeled chariot through boiling clouds, hair aflame. Mollandra almost didn’t see the goblet. At the centre of the circle the acolytes had made, following the symmetries of the design, lay a black almost-circle, a gyre of darkness, picked out in nail-sized tiles of ceramic, an area nearly a yard across. The black goblet stood at the centre of the gyre, camouflaged.

Undu set the flask on the mosaic, keeping her distance as if it had just been drawn from the furnace mouth. “There are stories of occasions when our kindness becomes something…less kind.” She spoke in her strange, lilting child’s voice. “There are stories of times when a sister becomes a thing of legend, touching the very skirts of the Furies themselves.”

Around the circle sharp breaths were drawn. That name was seldom spoken.

Undu smiled, a rare act that showed her years, counted in the lines where the crow set its foot to the corners of her eyes. “In this vault it would be a sin not to speak of the three, of the Furies, they who punish gods. We must name them. Alecto, our patron, unceasing in anger. Tisiphone, the avenger. Megaera, the keeper.”

When Alecto’s name passed Undu’s lips the crimson flame within the flask broke free and for a heartbeat burned across the glass. As the fire drew back Mollandra found herself rising to her feet, fists clenched as tight as her belly, teeth bared, challenging the others, all of whom seemed on the point of racing across the circle to rend their opposite number.

“Sit,” Undu commanded.

Tmanga was the first to obey. She sat heavily, unclenching her hands, the deep furrows of a frown spreading across the customary smoothness of her brow.

“There are stories of our kindness becoming something else,” Undu repeated. “Even before the founding of this academy, when our cult ran wild, springing up here and there like fire in the drylands, the records show occasions when divinity laid its hand upon a sister.

“Seven hundred years ago it is said that the princes of Themda denied Kindness Heera at their gates, and on high walls a thousand archers strained their bows. So great was her fury that it lifted her feet from the ground, blew the great bronze gates of Themda from their hinges, and sent lightning flying faster than any arrow to strike down those who raised their hands against her.

“Kindness Kretr, in the time of the northern fall, sought out the coin-lord in his high tower only to find the True Guard arrayed to block her path. The ruin she smote among those paladins that day brought an end to the order. Bones and smoke and blackened armour—nothing else remained.

“Twelve years ago, on the islet of Yoth, Kindness Terra’s true sister, Kindness Ome, went to bring judgement against Agga Manda, the pirate lord, rapist, eater of children, salter of fields, murderer of guests. Kindness Ome did not return, but no ship has flown the black claw since, and grass has yet to grow again on Yoth.”

Mollandra had heard the names Heera, Kretr, Ome, among many others in the shrine services that were held with the cycles of the moon. She had accepted the legends of the broken years as just that, the kind of tales people spin up into something more each time they are told. That Ome’s deed was supposedly done within her own lifetime was definitely new information. Also, suspicious information. No amount of training with the sword and knife would explain an island, even a dot in the ocean like Yoth, being burned to the bedrock. Necromancy could wither the crops, kill trees, and set the dead against the living—but the song of Ome made no mention of the necromantic arts.

“This.” Undu extended the pale, puffy hand of a drowned woman towards the flask and its fading glow. “This is the key to fury. The poison that opens doors to power. A story that your tongues will burn to tell. But believe me when I say that the suffering that waits for any who speak of today outside this room is beyond your imagining.

“I have waited because you were too young, and too many. Too young because the elixir requires a toughened vessel to contain it. Too many because the elixir is precious beyond gold or anything that might be purchased with it.

“Why then, would we not wait until the three had chosen themselves and risen from the boneyard of their fellow acolytes? Because, ladies, this is an ungentle brew and many of you will be carried back up those stairs that acolytes Sallay and Gane gossiped their way down. Probably the survivors will have to gather the pieces first.” She gestured to a pile of grey sacks that had gone unnoticed by the wall.

Sharp snorted as if this were amusing rather than a chance to lose most or all of her friends in the space of an hour.

“If we waited until the Kindnesses had been chosen, then shared the elixir and its secrets with them, it might be that we found ourselves with only two or one…or no Kindnesses at all to release into the world that year. It is, as with all things, a balance between risk and waste, a matter of timing, and, ladies, your time has come.”

As if summoned, Kindnesses Terra and Marta entered the chamber from the stairs. Marta first, followed by Terra, encumbered by a large, heavy, and complicated object that turned out to be a particularly big crossbow with a stand to steady it. The Kindness used a two-handled winding mechanism to put an extraordinary amount of draw on the firing cable and loaded an iron quarrel as thick as both Mollandra’s thumbs together.

“Rather than investigate your varying levels of bravado and cowardice, I will merely go around the circle in the order you have chosen. We’ll begin with Sister Sharp and see if we have finally found something that exceeds her limits. The rest of you are to keep your places. Anyone standing without being told to stand will not be standing up again.”

Even for girls who had faced the distinct possibility of death every day for nearly half a decade, the prospect of a mass slaughter without even any recourse to the skills they’d been trained in was a daunting one. All around the circle glances were exchanged, friends held each other’s gazes. If the spacing had been smaller, hands would have been grasped.