Three Acts of Penance [01] Attrition: The First Act of Penance

by S. G. Night

  Alexis reached up and patted him on the forehead. “Keep dreaming buddy. In the mean time, let’s settle this.”

  Virgil hurried back to the counter from his office, a dusty ledger in his grip. “This is everything,” he told her. “From the Year 3, up until last month.”

  “You’re a gem, Archivist,” Alexis said, taking the book.

  But Virgil didn’t let go of the roster. “Just a quick peek,” he reinforced seriously. “Bring it back as soon as you’re done. And, uh…don’t mention this to anyone.”

  Alexis winked at him and took the ledger. “Mum’s the word, Virg.” Then, to Toren she said: “C’mon, let’s sit down over here.”

  They took chairs together at one of the reading tables and cracked open the roster.

  “Oh-ho! Look at this!” Alexis cooed triumphantly. “It starts in Year 3, but it looks like a good amount pages were ripped out of the front! Something hidden, maybe?”

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” Toren groused.

  “We’ll see.” Alexis began to skim the contents of the roster. “Okay so…looks like Year 3 started with Mrak, a handful of adult Majiski, and…” she counted quickly. “…two dozen kids between the ages of two months and fourteen years old. All orphans.”

  Toren’s sulky scowl became a puzzled frown. “Doesn’t that mean—”

  Alexis finished for him. “Doesn’t that mean we should have a bunch of Genshwin who are all more than a hundred years old running around Velik Tor? Yes. But what happened to them…?”

  She skipped to the next page and continued. “Looks like Mrak kept picking up more and more young orphans, about seventy or eighty by the looks of it, until…” Pause. “Holy piss.”

  “What is it?” Toren asked.

  Alexis made an inexplicable gesture. “They just…die. All of them. In Year 55. One day, they’re all there, the next they’re all dead except for Mrak and five of the younger Genshwin.”

  “Year 55…” Toren murmured thoughtfully. “That must have been the when the eastern dormitory caved in!”

  “Uh huh…” Alexis said suspiciously. “So, it looks like it’s just the six of them until Year 70…and then bam! Twenty-five new orphans are brought in. And bam! Another hundred show up all at once in 74. And bam again! Another hundred or so in 86.”

  “That was my year,” Toren commented. “Don’t remember it too well, though. I was pretty young. Most of my earliest memories are of Velik Tor.”

  Alexis continued to read and found the next anomaly just a few lines down. “Huh…well that can’t be coincidence…”

  “What now?”

  “Those five Genshwin that survived the cave in?” She snapped her fingers with a note of fatality. “Dead. All five of ‘em. All at once in 87, right after the second batch of one-hundred orphans show up, right about when some of the older ones reach the rank of Warden. No explanation.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding,” Toren said.

  “Seriously, it’s right there!” Alexis said, pointing to the spot on the page. “After that, it looks like just random recruits of individual orphans over time….Yep there’s Racath and me in 99. And the last entry is that seven-year-old we found in 105.”

  A long silence followed.

  Eventually, Toren said: “We probably shouldn’t assume anything from this.”

  Alexis looked at him, shocked. “Assume? Toren, Velik Tor doesn’t have cave-ins! Five Genshwin masters don’t just up-and-die! Why are all the Genshwin old enough to remember the Occupation and the times before the Demons dead? Why did they all die under mysterious circumstances? Why did they all die in groups? Why did they only conveniently die after the younger recruits were old enough to train the next batch? Why did Mrak only bring in orphans too young to remember anything about what’s going on? Why did he torch half the Velik Tor library, and lock another quarter of it away? Why would he never teach us about magic, or history, or Jedanism? After all that, after all those missing pieces, you still think Mrak is clean as snow?”

  She shook her head emphatically. “No. It’s all too fishy. And you know what I think happened?”

  “Keep your voice down,” Toren hissed, shooting a furtive glance in Virgil’s direction.

  Alexis dropped her voice to an excited whisper. “I think that Mrak didn’t want anyone to know about something that went down in the Third Age. Something bad. Something he did. So he arranged to have that cave in happen, killing off anyone old enough to remember whatever he wanted to hide, and kept his five closest lieutenants around to help rebuild the Genshwin. Then, once he’d gotten a few hundred new recruits and trained them enough to continue building the Genshwin, he had those lieutenants killed off, too.”

  “But why though?” Toren demanded. “Why would he do that? What could he have to hide?”

  Alexis sighed to herself. “I don’t know. But like I said. I don’t trust Mrak as far as I can throw him.” She shut the ledger and dropped it onto the table. “And now, I’m not sure I even trust him that much.”

  ***

  THIRTY-ONE

  Cheating

  Racath threw himself into his training. His curriculum continued just as rigorously as before — principles and application of magic; sparring with the sword, Stingers, and hands in the pit; the studies of science, history, mathematics, and so on; Rotenic and Elven in the evening with Nelle; searching for his dosdom in his free time. Racath burned through all of it. He was eager to get back out into the field. Back into the fight against the Dominion. Maybe with the Scorpions, he could actually do some good.

  His study of magic was falling neatly into place for him now. He was absorbing the content of Oron’s morning lectures more completely than before. Every day he practiced the Magicks that Oron had shown him, he became increasingly adept. Soon, he was proficient in every Magick they had gone over. Spells became second nature to him. And as his skill multiplied, every new Magick that Oron taught him that much easier to master.

  Oron was still having Racath fend off onslaughts of illusionary shades in the pit each day, sharpening his swordsmanship and War-Magicks against multiple opponents. Occasionally, Oron would take up a training sword and spar with him personally, again emphasizing Racath’s need to master the sword. It worked: Racath quickly got the hang of the weapon. He was learning to adjust his previous training to adapt to wielding a sword; he had even begun to develop a modified version of the Kestrel echelon that would permit the use of a longsword in conjunction with the left-hand Stinger.

  His sparring with Nelle continued as well. After a few more weeks, Racath could best her with the sword three times out of five. Nelle, in turn, was improving with the Stingers — Racath was still more than a match for her, but it was getting harder and harder to fend her off. But it wasn’t until mid-Ethur that Racath could beat her flat-out in hand-fighting.

  Oron continued to school him on academics during the mid-day meals. Racath loved those lessons in particular. It felt good to know things, provided him with a comforting sense of security. In retrospect, he realized that almost every time he had felt doubt or fear during his missions with the Genshwin, it had been caused by his own lack of knowledge or understanding. That void of information had always been the result of both the Dominion’s and Mrak’s efforts to bury the past. But now, with this newfound comprehension of the world — the entire world — all that doubt had been brushed away.

  Oron persisted in his habit of attacking Racath when he was least expecting it. Glamoury was his preferred mode of operation, but occasionally he would simply lunge at him with a training sword, or make Glass Missile at the back of Racath’s head. Racath was getting used to defending himself. He had even begun noticing when Oron was about to strike. It kept him perpetually on his toes, his reflexes sharp as knives.

  The one real failure Racath experienced was in the search for his corobna dosdom. After weeks and weeks of searching, experimenting, and meditating, he still had not decided which energy he was most attuned to. His af
finity for fire kept coming back into his mind, but the incident with Briz’nar would always kill that notion. Surely, if it were fire, he would have unlocked it that day on the bridge. But still, there was nothing else that he felt drawn to quite as strongly.

  His studies with Nelle progressed as well. Linguistics, literature, culture, and so on. One night, Oron observed delightedly that the two of them could speak Rotenic just as well as they spoke Skuran. Both of them could navigate the intricacies of Rotenic glyphs, and were also approaching fluency in the Elven tongue. Nelle also began to read to Racath from taj Libris Io, teaching him the doctrine and principles of the Church that his mother had left out.

  The friendship between the two of them continued to grow. They spent nearly every waking moment together: doing chores, talking, reading, teasing, sparring….It was easy to be Nelle’s friend, Racath found.

  Easy, but not quite effortless. She had a habit of making cryptic hints about her visions of the future, but never gave him any explicit details. Just as Racath had guessed on his first day in the domus, her moods and personality seemed defined by both her experiences of the past and her glimpses of the future. We are all shaped by our memories, but Nelle’s memories extended both backward and forward in time. It made her enigmatic and (on occasion) nearly impossible to read.

  They still swam together each day after sparring. It had become routine by then, and any trace amounts of discomfort had vanished completely. Although, Racath still was unsure why the augur never removed her gloves. Some Majiski were protective of their markara, certainly — especially in times like these. It was a private thing. But then again, so was bathing, and she didn’t seem to have any issues with that….

  ——

  It wasn’t until the 21st day of Ethur that Racath got an idea. It came to him as he and Oron were descending the steps to the sparring pit — an idea that came in the form of a single word: cheating.

  “We’ll start with wards today,” Oron announced, his back to Racath as he walked to his usual spot, about ten feet from Racath. “You could use some practice there. After that, I think we’ll work on disillusionment. And maybe later we’ll see if you can still make the Shroud.”

  Racath said nothing. He noticed how Oron did not look at him while he spoke — something, he had observed, prophesied one of the older Majiski’s random assaults. Usually, Oron would try to lull him into a false sense of security by beginning a lecture, then glamouring him mid-sentence. Bearing that in mind, Racath furtively flexed his markara and planted a small pocket of invisible energy in the sand between himself and his teacher.

  He did this before Oron turned to face him, but Nelle noticed his motion from her spot on the wall. She cocked her head at him, eyebrow tilted: a wordless what are you doing? Racath smirked at her and shook his head.

  “Now,” Oron said, facing Racath. “Remember that when you’re making a ward, you want to—”

  Racath saw the sudden change in Oron’s stance immediately. The older Majiski’s eyes suddenly locked on his, his shoulders flexed, and his eyebrows drew together. This was it — Oron was about to hex him.

  But before Oron could open his mouth, Racath cheated. Focusing his mind and his magic, Racath made glamoury: “Vet hoppek dye u ruib, toh mon’húnn!”

  The hex caught Oron off-guard. The older Majiski blinked, perplexed, hesitated for a moment, then shook it off. “Wait—”

  Racath didn’t waste a single second. He drew his arm back and made Red Lash. A long, thin tendril of scarlet mage-fire extended from his markara like a burning bullwhip. Flicking his wrist, he snapped the whip of flame at Oron.

  The tip of the fire broke across the older Majiski’s chest. Racath hadn’t put too much energy into the Magick — if he had, the attack could have incinerated Oron’s ribcage. Instead, the watered-down Red Lash merely shoved Oron back a few paces, leaving a sooty blot on the front of his shirt.

  Oron staggered, bracing himself against the stone wall to stop himself from falling. His eyes were wide with surprise.

  Smug, Racath let the mage-fire whip disperse into the air. “You were saying something?”

  “Damn,” Oron gasped. “That was good, Racath. I didn’t see that coming.” He steadied himself, then frowned. “Toh mon’húnn…” he repeated. “Did you really just call me a doorknob?”

  Racath shrugged, smirking again. “It was all I could think of.”

  “You’re thinking on your feet,” Oron said appreciatively. “I commend you. Now, as I was saying, when you’re warding, you want to—”

  This time, when Oron broke off mid-word for a second attack, he abandoned glamoury in favor of a bare-handed lunge.

  Racath stood perfectly still, as Oron flew at him, fists cocked. He did not twitch. He did not flinch. He did not respond.

  He did laugh aloud though, as Oron triggered the ward that Racath had implanted in the sand. The tiny sphere of unseen energy exploded upward, enveloping Oron. Racath had loaded the trap with the Bind — the limb-locker hex — and when Oron tripped it, the Magick grabbed him. His arms and legs snapped straight, binding him where he stood.

  Nelle almost fell off the ledge laughing. Oron could only glare at Racath, immobilized.

  “When I’m warding, I should focus on placing the energy and let the magic hold it in place rather than think too hard about keeping it stable,” Racath finished Oron’s instruction. “That is what you were about to say, right?”

  His arms and legs might have been frozen, but Oron did have the capacity to roll his eyes.

  Racath applied his idea again later during his first bout with Oron’s shades. Oron explicitly stated that he wanted Racath to only use the sword for this session — no Stingers, no magic.

  Oron began the exercise, and a dozen featureless shades with iron clubs faded into existence around Racath. They closed in on him. But Racath did not draw the sword from his belt. Instead, he looked at the older Majiski standing on the sidelines. Oron’s eyes were squeezed shut, his brow furrowed and sweaty as he focused on maintaining twelve illusions at once.

  Ignoring the shades, Racath lifted his hand, palm up facing Oron, and made Push of Glass. A wall of concussive force erupted out of his markara, blasting Oron hard enough to break his concentration.

  Oron stumbled, cursing, and the shades vanished in puffs of smoke. “Racath! I said no magic!”

  Racath beamed at Oron toothily. “Wasn’t it you who said that only rule in war was to win? By any means necessary?”

  Oron frowned. “You cheated. I’m not the target.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?” Racath said. “You encourage me to cheat, remember? So long as I win and my opponent’s dead, who cares if I bend the rules?”

  The older Majiski sighed tiredly. “Yes, yes. I applaud your thinking. But today is about the sword. So do it again. Sword out, please.”

  Oron shut his eyes tight and the shades materialized again, iron cudgels ready. Racath looked up at Nelle, winked, and drew his sword. The shades moved in on him. He concentrated, flexed, and made two Magicks at once.

  First, the ‘Flage — the Magick that would force light to bend around him, rendering him camouflaged. He wasn’t invisible, but Oron’s vision was entirely reliant on the shades right now, so it would hide him well enough for his purposes.

  Simultaneously, he made his own shade: a copy of himself, sword and Shadow included. He backed away, camouflaged, leaving the illusionary Racath-shade in the spot where he had stood a moment before. He retreated until he stood outside the circle of Oron’s shades.

  The shades closed in on the fake Racath. Racath’s illusion stood fearlessly, even as the mob of black specters mauled him with their iron clubs. The Racath-shade dissolved, and Oron’s illusions were suddenly swinging at empty air. Off to the side, Oron’s face twitched with confusion.

  Racath released the ‘Flage. Sword out, he lunged, cutting the shades down one by one from behind. He was too fast for the shades to recover. Clustered as they were around the
site of the false-Racath’s disappearance, the real Racath could chop through them all in quick succession, like hewing down stalks of corn.

  The last shade scattered beneath his blade. Not one of them had managed to raise their club against him. With a casual nonchalance, Racath spun the sword around and put the tip into the sand. Leaning on it, he smiled at Oron again. Oron glowered at him.

  “Dammit, Thanjel!”

  “What?” Racath demanded innocently.

  “I’m glad you’ve gotten the Scorpion philosophies through your head, Racath,” Oron said, annoyed. “And it’s hard to scold you when you’re succeeding, but please, do as I say.”

  “You’re just pissed that I’m beating you,” Racath responded.

  Oron glared at him. “And you’re just scared that you’ll get your ass kicked if you have to rely entirely on the sword.”

  “Oooo…” Nelle said from her perch. “Oh, no he didn’t…”

  Racath’s smile was indulgent, condescending. “You really think so, huh?”

  “You have yet to prove otherwise.”

  Racath set his jaw. “Alright then. Hit me.”

  “Gladly.” Oron shut his eyes, and concentrated.

  “Don’t say you didn’t ask for it…” Racath murmured, too softly for Oron to hear.

  A dozen fresh shades started to appear around him. They faded in from nothingness, black smoke and iron clubs.

  Racath lunged before the phantoms had fully materialized. Grabbing the first shade by its arm, he rammed his sword through its sternum. He slashed sideways, tearing the blade free from the fading shade, decapitating a second. His weapon blurred, spun, flashed. Racath swung. Stabbed. Jumped. Ducked. Rolled. Cut. Parried. Punched. Smashed. Grabbed. Impaled.

  In the space of five seconds, he destroyed all but one shade. Attacking the last, he swung upward, cutting clean through the shade’s right armpit, then downward through its left shoulder. Both of the shade’s black, featureless arms fell to the sand, fading into dark smoke. Racath broke what was left of the specter in his hands.