by Aaron Crash
The citadel seemed as empty and as lonely as Tori’s own heart.
A voice whispered to her. “Toriah Welldeep. Why do you weep?” It was Gatha asking. She normally had a slight growl, if not a downright snarl, to her speech. But right then? Her words were soft, almost gentle.
Tori spun around. There was the she-orc with a pile of books in her arms. She was barefoot, which was why Tori hadn’t heard her approach.
The wide little woman grabbed the first alibi that entered her mind. “Oh, Gatha, I wasn’t crying. I was laughing. I heard a joke this morning, from Fryla Walker, you know Fryla. That girl is funny. She’s with that big Flow sophist guy, Erigg Bloogg. He’s Gruul. You know him?”
The she-orc stepped closer. Her neck was bandaged where Ymir had nicked it. She was wearing her Sunfire robes over her normal white tunic. “There are tears on your face.”
“Not tears,” the dwab insisted. “A little rain. Me? Crying? Gosh, no. I’m about the most cheerful girl at this school. You’ve seen me laughing in the kitchen, I know you have.” Tori couldn’t help but sniffle. “And I have a little cold. Just my luck, getting sick before the First Exam. I’ll be okay, though. Us Morbuskor have strong constitutions.”
Gatha squinted at her. “You’re lying. Why lie? If you are sad, be sad. If you don’t want me to know, tell me to mind my own fucking business. I know the difference between laughing and crying. You must think I’m stupid.”
That made Tori angry. Being angry was better than letting someone see you cry, but not by much. She smiled and tried to play nice. She needed the she-orc’s help finding a book on Knowing Lore and she might have a space big enough to allow them to process their raw xoca pods. “Gatha, yep, you caught me. I was crying. You don’t want to know why, though. You wouldn’t care.”
Gatha’s eyes narrowed. “So you admit to lying. I like that. Who says I don’t care about you? What makes you so special?”
“I mean, you’re an orc. I’m a dwab. Our races don’t much like each other.” Tori wiped at her nose and her face. This was just awkward.
The she-orc shrugged. “I like who I like. I’ve had my fill of orcs in this life. It’s one of the reasons why I came here. Mostly, though, I came for the books. I’ve shared a truth with you. Now, share a truth with me. Tell me why you were crying.”
“No.” Tori chuckled, more out of disbelief than anything. “I mean, it’s private. I won’t tell you to mind your own business, or curse you, but...”
“But what?” the she-orc asked.
The dwab took a minute to think. This might be her only chance to get Gatha on her side. “But it’s embarrassing for me. I’m the cheerful little dwab, right? You caught me when I was vulnerable. I guess that makes me weak, or dishonorable, or what have you.”
“Lying made you dishonorable,” Gatha said. She was a straight shooter, all right.
Tori kept her laugh to herself.
The she-orc continued. “Crying has nothing to do with strength. I wept in the Pits of Ssunash in front of an arena of my people. I shrieked. I tore at my hair. I cursed the gods and I cursed my family. Snot ran down my face and dripped off my tusks. I wept, but I didn’t lose. I was the best, the strongest, the fastest, the mightiest. I could fucking weep all I fucking wanted.”
“Sounds like quite a story,” Tori said gently. “Sounds sad, if you want to know the truth.”
“Only fools laugh all the time,” Gatha shot back sharply. “I thought you were a fool, Toriah Welldeep. I did see you in the kitchen, braying like a donkey. And yet, here I find you, weeping. It makes me curious, and it makes me like you. I don’t care about your fucking race. I don’t like races. I like people.” The she-orc laughed. There was a certain little twinkle in her eye. “No, I don’t like people. I’ve spent over a year alone. It’s been nice up until today, I think. Today, my heart has grown hungry for something other than books and isolation.”
Tori thought she knew why. Facing Ymir might’ve shaken the she-orc some. Tori could understand that—the barbarian could unnerve a person like nothing else.
The dwab let out a long, exhausted sigh. “Gatha, my girl, I’m tired tonight. Bless my stone bits, I’m tired. I need to get home, get into bed, and get to sleep before Fryla and Erigg start up. How about I tell you my troubles another time?”
A look of disappointment swept over the she-orc’s face, a look of hurt in her eyes. It was gone in an instant. The dwab couldn’t believe it.
What she said next seemed equally unbelievable. “Will you promise to share this grief with me another time?” There was desperation there.
The she-orc’s heart really did seem hungry for company. This poor Gruul had been alone for a long time, and Tori knew how that felt. The tragedy of loneliness was that if you didn’t gather friends and take care to connect with them, when you needed them, they weren’t there. It was like a flower garden with nothing but weeds and stems and not a flower petal in sight.
“I promise, Gatha,” Tori said. “I promise so much.”
Gatha nodded. “Very well. When you find cloth, blow your nose, for you have snot on your face.” The she-orc librarian turned and walked off, feet slapping on the marble.
The dwab was still thinking about the she-orc when she walked through the Zoo’s front door. Maybe Gatha wasn’t your typical orc. She did love books, that was clear. Maybe Tori was wrong about the Gruul in general.
The dwab soon lost herself in more work. There were dishes to be done, and Ribrib had left the bathroom a mess. Tori tidied up until she was too tired to go on.
She took a long, hot shower, got in her best, most comfy nightgown, and climbed into her bed. Without Ymir there, it felt too big, too cold, and she felt so alone.
She wondered how Gatha felt that night. Was her bed as empty? Probably. Maybe the Morbuskor and the Gruul weren’t so different in the end.
Chapter Six
NEARLY TWO WEEKS LATER, on a Friday at the very end of October, Ymir was ready for the First Exam of his sophist year. The clansman followed the Examiner down into the dungeon under the Flow Tower. Sunfire torches flickered on the walls. Somewhere water dripped, and the place had a damp, musty smell that the clansman was getting used to.
It was a pity his exam had been scheduled that day. Outside, the sky was clear, the sun was out, and it was warm—a bit of summer left over to tease them all before the winds and freezing rains came to stay.
This was the fifth time he’d taken the exams, and he’d done fine every other time, even when he’d been sabotaged by Nellybelle Tucker.
Ymir was looking forward to the exams this year. There would be more swordplay than in previous tests due to his Personal Combat Techniques class. Fuck Professor Slurp—Ymir had covered the material himself, with the help of Gatha.
The rest of the clansman’s class load was lively and interesting. He had to admit that his favorite course that semester was with Nile Preat. Her Age of Discord class had answered some of his questions, though they still hadn’t gotten to the murder of Aegel Akkridor. That was what really interested him, given how many theories there were for the epoch-ending event of the vempor’s death.
He liked to go to his sophist Flow class just to see the pained look on Professor Leel’s face whenever he entered her room. That was also where he saw his princesses and their friends. He had a good time there, especially since they’d started working on Flow prolium magic. Issa Leel was also his advisor on his independent study into cantrips. He’d mastered Flow cantrips, but he had to practice the other three types of sorcery, the Studiae Magica. Each of those four types were divided into the Categoria Magica, which consisted of cantrips, armatus, prolium, fascinara, and devocho—those last two were the two major arcana he would only start learning his third year, when he was a judician.
More challenging was his first Form class, Basic Alchemy with Brodor Bootblack. He had that class with an odd collection of people. He and Tori were lab partners, so that was fun, but the two she-orcs, Kacky and Glu
ck, competed with them in everything. Kacky had a massive belly and thick arms and legs, while Gluck had the body of an ax handle. Both were noisy and raucous and, yes, very entertaining. Not only did they insult each other, but they also teased Brodor, who hated them so very much. The banter kept things interesting.
He had another class to suffer through, like always. This one was through the Moons College, another literature class on the genius of Willmur Swordwrite. Once again, he had a class with Ibeliah Ironcoat, and she emphasized the magic of inspiration. That was all so much elkshit to Ymir. However, the bearded dwab did bring in a guest lecturer, Linnylynn Albatross, to talk about the demonology present in Swordwrite’s work. That kept Ymir coming back, though if he was at all tired, he’d sleep through the lecture. Ibeliah’s voice was gruff, so it wasn’t exactly quiet and calming, but it would do. As for Linnylynn, she wasn’t getting any less erratic or strange. Nonetheless, Ymir thought she was harmless enough. She seemed more interested in the idea of orishas than in actually summoning them.
While he walked down with the Examiner, Ymir again found himself considering the Akkiric Rings. He'd been wrestling with that poem by Derzahla Lubda, and he’d found another scroll that referenced it. It involved the bones of a sorcerer, that was clear, and that stank of necromancy. This whole business had taken a distinctly demonic turn. But he couldn’t ponder that or the Akkir Akkor, the spirits or entities or whatever on the other side of the veil. He had to focus on the exam or he’d find himself expelled.
The Examiner wore robes with the Flow symbol on them—a black hand on a gray background. Their face was covered by an ornate mask—an open palm—and a hood. They were an outsider, an uninterested party, who could be objective.
The masked figure opened the door and walked inside the entry room. Ymir followed, expecting to see a simple square chamber, ten feet by ten feet. Instead, he was in a vast hall with a deep chasm splitting the room in half.
The Examiner vanished, leaving no trace.
There was about fifty feet between him and the crack. A yellow fog boiled out of the abyss to float across the white-tiled floor. A table sat against the wall to his right. Various vials, plates, and bowls were there, and Ymir recognized an alchemical laboratory. That made sense. He’d need the powders and potions to fight that yellow mist, which he could already smell—rotten eggs and something else, sweet with decay.
The walls themselves were covered in multicolored tiles—a mosaic that changed. The tiles clacked as they flipped, showing different colors, reorganizing themselves.
The back of Ymir’s neck froze. Ice tickled his spine, and he felt the familiar revulsion. The entire dungeon had been changed with powerful Form magic, becoming a testing ground that he had to conquer.
The Examiner’s voice echoed through the hall. “Find me, Ymir, son of Ymok. Find me like the Hanish prince found the ghost of his dead father.”
Ymir recognized the reference—the Hanish prince was Thamel Rheo from a Willmur Swordwrite play. Thamel’s father haunted the corners of the palace in Hanland, which used to be a region up north, where Winterhome lay. The ghost only haunted the corners.
The Examiner would be hiding in one of the far corners. Ymir saw the tasks at hand. He had to extinguish the yellow smoke rising from the crack, magic his way across the abyss, and get to the other side. There would be a fight, he knew, and he’d have to use a sword.
The clansman grinned. Fucking magic was terrifying, but it had created this place and this puzzle. He loved the game far more than he should’ve. He didn’t have time to really enjoy it because the yellow smoke was making it hard to breathe.
He sniffed sulfur, and another compound, kankrast, which was a magical powder found deep in the Sunrise Mountains. Ymir hurried to the table. Above him, the clacking mosaics had reorganized themselves into a portrait of a man, Faegen the Cripple. He had been a thin, sickly man, both stupid and cruel. Jenny liked to say she didn’t mind stupid people as long as they weren’t cruel. She wouldn’t have liked Faegen, who’d been the fifteenth ancestor of Aeno Akkridor, and the very worst of the Age of Discord vempors.
Ymir didn’t know what Faegen was doing up there on the wall, but he’d wrestle with that problem once he neutralized the kankrastic gas. He coughed a bit as he grabbed a bowl of salt. He knew salt—the clans traded in salt, which was as precious as gold to the Summertown merchants. Wooden shelves holding glass vials filled with compounds sat above the bowl. Nothing was labeled. Ymir didn’t need the labels—Brodor had his scholars memorize the Alchemist’s Rack in the first week of his class. Ymir grabbed the pearlwater dust, sprinkled it into a copper bowl, and added twice the amount of salt. He then finalized it with a good amount of blood sand, which came from the Viridis Peninsula far to the east.
He took the bowl and hurried to the crevice. He couldn’t breathe that kankrastic gas in, and he still had the mystery of the Faegen mosaic to consider. Faegen was carried around in a harness by his servants, and supposedly, there had been an accident in Four Roads, on the Dynasty Bridge that spanned Long River. There were four bridges in Four Roads, but the Dynasty was the biggest and grandest. Faegen had fallen into the river and was killed. Most thought it was an assassination by his oldest brother, Anthaegen, who took power.
Anthaegen had later retaken Hanland to the north, which had enjoyed a decade of independence. That went back to Willmur Swordwrite’s play. It was all connected. The clansman loved when he saw the patterns become distinct.
Ymir knew exactly where that smoke was coming from. There was a harness on his side of the bridge. He hurried into the yellow smoke, saw it pluming up from the crack, and dumped the new compound, the pearlblood sand, down into the center of the gas cloud. Immediately, the air cleared, and Ymir could breathe. Across the room, the corners seemed empty, but of course they did. He’d have to choose one, though, because that was where the Examiner would be hiding.
One problem at a time.
The walls on his left were shifting, the mosaic tiles flipping and clattering as they rearranged themselves. They came together to form a picture of a battle in a forest with a wide river in the distance. Ymir recognized the famous painting The Taming of the Elven Woods. This was several hundred years before Faegen the Cripple’s murder. This was Aeno’s grandson, who entered the Ohlyrran Forest to slaughter the elves and force them into the Akkridorian empire.
This had to give him a clue on how to get over that chasm, which seemed to stretch down forever. Ymir thought to use his Flow magic to create an ice bridge, but that didn’t feel right. Most scholars wouldn’t have that ability, not as sophists, but then Ymir had always been able to wield power far above the normal scholar.
The clansman considered the painting The Taming of the Elven Woods, though the Ohlyrrans called it something else, something more poetic. He grinned. They called it Nineenee’s Sorrow because the river ran with blood. And Aeno’s grandson, the Vempor Pae Nho, had crossed it using fallen trees buttressed by corpses lashed together.
Pae Nho was as bloodthirsty and deranged as any of the Akkridorian vempors—brilliant and cruel. Jenny would’ve loved him.
Ymir raced over to the left wall. He saw the tiles of the Nineenee River, but when he looked closely, he could see stones sticking out, the same blue as the river. He had to adjust his perspective to see them. Ymir then noticed the rock handholds above, lost in the brown and green of the Ohlyrran Forest. By using the footholds and the handholds, he made his way across the chasm and to the other side.
The mosaics showed an image of Pae Nho in his white bone armor with his Gruul sword, equally white. This image was life-size, and Ymir knew exactly what would happen next.
The tiles shifted, rising from the wall and becoming a mosaic man, complete with a sword. The tiles continued to shift around, shivering and clacking.
“Jelu prolium!” Ymir built himself an ice sword, taking the moisture from the air and channeling it into a cold length a yard long. It wouldn’t hold up against a real b
lade, but it would work fine against the tile weapon of the mosaic man.
Ymir recalled a line from Willmur Swordwrite’s historical play that dramatized the tragedy of Nineenee’s Sorrow. I see the pale hand of death, the white left hand of the murderer, as chaste as a dove, but his red right hand plucks sorrow from the breast of women, red with passion, red with lust, red with the blood of the innocent and the damned.
Was the Examiner supposedly death, the pale hand? That would mean they’d be in the left corner. Or was there murder in the Examiner’s heart? Then they’d be in the right corner, like the red right hand from the poem.
Ymir crossed blades with the mosaic man, who was using Gruul defenses, not unlike Gatha, though it was a more archaic form. Also, this mosaic man wasn’t fighting with any anger. It was cold and precise and easy. Ymir waited for the mosaic golem to lunge at him.
It was then a quick matter of using the wizarding riposte. Ymir beat the blow aside and shouted, “Caelum caelarum!” His ice blade was quickened with the attack and he shattered the mosaic man into a million tiles that scattered across the floor.
The walls changed, clattering once more, and as Ymir thought, it was a scene from Willmur Swordwrite’s play about Pae Nho. The main character, the vempor himself, stood in the left corner. In the right was his ethics teacher, whom Pae Nho had murdered. That teacher was in black-and-gray robes.
It was all too easy. Ymir went over to the right corner, ice sword in hand, and approached. “You, Examiner, are not the pale hand of death. You are red with passion and alive with curiosity. This exam was very entertaining. I applaud you.” The clansman was glad he’d remember the exam, since it had been fun. Most scholars wouldn’t.
The Examiner appeared in the right corner in their open-palm mask and Flow robes.
Ymir watched the figure take shape, and he felt another wave of cold sweep up his back and lift the fine hairs on the back of his neck. His dusza went cold. He floated off the ground while losing his sword. It turned to water in his hand, and the whole length splashed to the ground. He hardly felt it leave his hands.
