01 - The Price of Talent

by Peter Whittlesey

  My evenings spent practicing with my sword were more rewarding. These were usually the evenings that Meredith had night shift at the hospital and I didn’t feel like exploring the library. There was something about the fading twilight and an empty practice yard that drew me into practicing my sword work. As the summer had faded into fall. The evening air had taken on a crisper, cooler quality. This made a bit of physical exertion pleasant, instead of when I had to engage in it during the heat of the day when practicing with Alfieri and the initiate inquisitors, or with Claudius during my private tutoring sessions.

  My practices would start with running through the forms and exercises that I had been taught by Devlin as a means of warm up. Then I would focus on learning new skills with the sword. I found out early that the sword flew best while spinning like a big buzz saw. My other discovery was that the sword worked surprisingly well as a wand. It made focusing lighting strikes easier, in much the same way that Claudius’s wand could. Adding lightning to my strikes gave them a bit of an explosive quality. This was caused by the energy discharging as it came near to the targets. I could also make the sword white hot, causing it to burn through the target when I hit it. On a normal sword, this would quickly cause the blade to deform, as white hot metal becomes more malleable, which is why blacksmiths heat metal to this temperature before working on it. But because my sword was magic, it retained its strength and rigidity despite the amount of heat focused in the blade. I could also make the blade ice cold, but I had not found a practical use for that yet.

  My time with the initiate inquisitors presented me with a more varied set of activities. Alfieri needed to teach them a wide array of skills and, while he did not like me personally, he found me quite useful in training the inquisitors. Frequently he would have me hide somewhere within the castle and grounds and have me periodically channel some magical energy. He would then send out his pupils to find me. Sometimes it took them longer than others. The inquisitor initiates had the most trouble finding me during the times when priest initiates were practicing magic in their classes. The false signals created a sort of interference and made it hard for them and their medallions to discern a single magic user. Other times he would have me spar with them, under very close supervision, and tell me to use one type of magic to aid my attacks or another. The idea was to get them used to dealing with someone who may have learned on their own how to put their magic to use. This had the side benefit of teaching me which techniques confounded them the most. Also, it gave me a chance to try and maintain my mental focus while also defending myself with a weapon. Or, since it was sparring, a wooden stave. I found that it was too difficult to try and make snowballs to throw at them (snowballs, not icicles, because if they did hit an initiate they were less likely to get impaled by a snowball). It took too much time and energy to make a snowball for it to be useful during a fight. Lighting their staves on fire worked like a charm though; well, until an initiate burned a finger and Alfieri put a stop to that. I also enjoyed using telekinesis to trip them, move their guard out of the way of my strikes, or send them flying. I could even use it to disarm my opponent, if they weren’t expecting it and I had drawn enough energy. Still, the initiates were clever and they were developing strategies to deal with my skills. The most effective technique was just to overwhelm me with numbers. I could fight off one or two, and maybe trip a third with telekinesis, but four or five coming at me at once was too much usually.

  All of this presented quite a few practical issues for any future escape attempts. Unfortunately, we had no idea where Meredith’s father was being held, and had been able to find no records of his capture. As winter was approaching we would need warm gear for long treks through the cold and we only had access to the church supplied monk and nurse attire. Then there was the issue that, while I could defend myself, I could be overwhelmed by numbers and Claudius could knock me out quite easily. Lastly, and most importantly, we did not have any real plan of escape. So, no plan, no destination and inadequate gear made our intended escape a difficult proposition.

  One evening in early fall, when Meredith dropped by after rounds at the hospital, I decided to voice my concerns.

  “And then the same farmer was back with his stitched up arm infected again. So I asked him, ‘have you been changing the dressing and keeping it clean like I asked?’ and he had the gall to say ‘yes’ despite the fact that he showed up with the same dressing I put on it a week earlier!’” Meredith said, mid-rant about one of the patients she had seen that day. “I swear, I can’t wait to get out of here, find my father and get away from all these idiots. My patients back home were never this dumb.”

  “Meredith, sorry for interrupting, but I was wondering if you had any more thoughts on how we are going to escape?” I asked. “Because I have and it doesn’t seem like we have very many practical options. We don’t have the proper gear, we don’t know where your father is, and we don’t know where we will go even if we find him.”

  “Ok, fine, if you don’t want to hear about my day anymore… I have been doing some thinking on the subject,” she replied. “I have been doing some digging, and apparently they keep files on all the students they house and train here at Caer Sud. If we could get access to these files, we may be able to find out what happened to my father, and possibly even your friends; you know, the gang of bandits you were living with.”

  “Well, that sounds like a promising lead. Where are these records located?” I asked.

  “Uh, well, this is why I haven’t brought it up yet. I don’t know.” She responded.

  “Well, that does pose a problem,” I said. “What about the issue of getting the gear we will need to escape during the winter?”

  “Oh, that’s fairly easy,” she replied. “The castle has quite a lot of storerooms with gear for inquisitors to go on patrols. My thought is we just borrow some of these supplies before we leave.”

  “And where are these supply rooms?” I asked.

  “In the main castle somewhere,” said Meredith. “Probably near where the guards are housed.”

  “So, in some room in the basement of the castle?” I asked. “That’s what we know?”

  “Yeah, pretty much,” she said. “Back when you were being housed in the dungeon, I used to be allowed through there all the time. The guards were always quite friendly.”

  “I’ll bet they were…” I said, remembering how not friendly they were to me.

  To be more charitable, they weren’t friendly, in that they made no attempt to be friendly towards me. But they didn’t do anything to make my stay any more unpleasant either. But given my temperament at the time, I was not likely to view them all that charitably. After all, I had spent quite some time locked in a cold stone room in the basement, and they were the people whose job it was to keep me there.

  “I bet if I talk to one or two of them they’ll lead me to the storerooms and I’ll be able to leave with what we need,” she said.

  “And how were you planning on doing that?” I asked.

  “Oh, by asking one of the younger men to join me in the storeroom,” She said. “They’re usually the ones most eager to help me when I’ve visited people there before. You’d think they’d have never seen a girl before by how they react when I’m around. There are plenty of girls in both the inquisitors and the guard though.”

  “Something tells me that the kind of girls who like guarding the jail are not the sort who… uh, would enjoy hanging out with young men,” I replied.

  “Regardless, it should make it easy for me to find what we need and sweet talk my way out again,” she said.

  “Just make sure they don’t try anything… uh, untoward,” I said, flailing away mentally to find the right word.

  “Oh please,” she said with a smile, “I have very little to fear from them. If they try to get fresh or handsy, they will get the ol’ knock out spell, same as any belligerent patient.”

  “How are we going to keep this gear hidden until we have the oppor
tunity to escape?” I asked.

  “Well, I think we just keep it in the storeroom until we are on our way out,” she said. “What I mean is that, on the night we escape, I will secure the gear we need and keep it with me. There’s no point in getting it before we need it, and if things go missing, or a guard wakes up locked in a storeroom, questions are going to get asked. I think it would be preferable to be long gone from here when that happens.”

  “Ok, so that covers the gear,” I said. “Now we need a pretext or distraction to cover our tracks when we leave, so that we have a decent head start over the people Claudius is undoubtedly going to send to capture us.”

  “That’s also not too hard to come up with,” she said. “From what I have heard from my classmates, every year, before the winter solstice celebrations, they hold an exam for the inquisitor initiates who they deem worthy of becoming full inquisitors. Usually this involves trying to catch the advanced students in the priest training class. This year though, I bet it will involve tracking and capturing you. But even if it doesn’t, it will act as a decent distraction under which we will be able to escape.”

  “So… The exam for the inquisitors is to try to catch the priest initiates?” I asked. “What all is involved in that?”

  “Well, from what I have heard, it’s a lot like your training sessions in the yard,” she replied. “Essentially, they send out some of the more advanced priest initiates to hide on the grounds, and the inquisitor initiates are sent to find them. The most successful teams, or individuals, in capturing priest initiates get passing grades and graduate to become full inquisitors. Those that fail have to endure another year of training.”

  “Ok, that makes sense, and explains a lot of the training Claudius and Alfieri have been having us do, but I think we’re going to need to know more if we’re going to plan our escape around it,” I said.

  “Well, that may be a bit of a problem,” she said. “From what I have been told, they try to change up the format a little every year, to keep the test from being too easy for the initiates and to test their ability to solve problems on the fly.”

  “Then how do we plan our escape around it?” I asked.

  “I think we’re going to need to play things a little loose, I’m afraid,” she said. “We know the approximate date, right around the winter solstice, and we know generally what it will involve, i.e. sending the initiates on a castle-wide game of hide and seek.”

  “So the plan is just to use the confusion of the exam to steal what we need and slip out the front door?” I asked. “Because, if your suspicions are true and they are going to use me in the exam, then a lot of eyes are going to be on me and our escape routes.”

  “True, but we will be dressed as guards, I was hoping that might allow us to slip out the front gate,” she said.

  “Will there be a lot of people visiting the castle for the ceremony?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure honestly, most likely there will be,” she said. “You think that will help us escape?”

  “I was thinking that we might be able to slip out on someone’s cart or carriage,” I said. “After all, the stables are right by the front gate, we might well be able to slip onto a carriage or into a crate on an outgoing cart from there.”

  “That might work actually,” she said. “Even if a lot of people aren’t coming in for graduation, there will probably be an increase in deliveries to the castle, and that should mean an increase in people leaving as well.”

  “We should probably do some spying to see what sort of security will be in place, that might give us some ideas on how to slip out unnoticed,” I said. “Last thing we need is to run into some unforeseen problem and have to abandon the plan after you have pilfered some gear from the castle storerooms.”

  “Ok, so what we need is more information…” Meredith said pensively, “I think I should handle finding information about where personal files are kept, as people are a little suspicious of you, and then you can use some of your free time to go for long walks around the castle grounds. That way you can walk by the castle gate frequently enough to get a better idea of the security there.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “I’ll make long walks part of my regular evening training, call it a warm up before hitting the targets. If anyone asks, I’ll tell them I’m just stretching my legs before a workout. Hopefully that will be enough cover to get a good look at the security here on a regular basis.”

  “And I will spend some time poking around and talking to teachers about where files are kept,” said Meredith. “See if I can come up with some sort of research project as an excuse to poke around.”

  “Do you get many research projects?” I asked. “Because my training mostly involves using magic and sparring.”

  “Well, your education is a little… different from normal priest initiates,” said Meredith. “We spend a lot of time in the classroom. This is especially true of the few of us learning how to be doctors. There is a lot to learn about human anatomy and the use of magic power to help heal people. My time is almost evenly split between book learning and working in the hospital.”

  “What about initiates learning about other areas of study?” I asked, genuinely curious. “Since I’m being tutored privately by Claudius, I’m not sure how they fill their days. All I know is that most of them shoot me dirty looks at meal time and pointedly ignore me.”

  “Well, the dirty looks are because you are denounced as a murderer by most of the staff here, as you well know,” she said. “As for how other priest initiates’ days go, I’m not sure. I believe their days are evenly split between instruction and work as well. Those who can conjure fire light the candles, keep the fires going and even help out in the kitchens. Others work in the vegetable garden, brew beer and other stuff like that. Didn’t Claudius explain most of this to you?”

  “He did, but he just explained it in general terms,” I said. “And I wasn’t going to question him too much at the time. After all, he had only just let me out of my basement cell.”

  “Well, anyway, most of the priests attend classes and help with chores around the castle,” she said. “Because there are so few of us, most of us have our duties assigned on an individual basis. I know some who are quite book smart who are going to end up in the church administration in Caer Dogmatorum. The best speakers are being trained to give sermons to local populations who have aging local priests. It really depends, you know?”

  “I wonder what that means I’m being trained to do?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” said Meredith. “I think Claudius has special plans for you. He’s getting on in years though. Maybe he wants you to replace him. Given your skills with external uses of magic power, that would make sense, and it would explain why he is personally training you.”

  “Ugh!... That’s a scary thought,” I said. “Me, in charge of capturing other kids the same way I was? Why would he think I would go along with that?”

  “Same reason every kid who is captured does,” said Meredith. “Treat someone well, nurture their powers, and feed their ego a steady diet of lies about their abilities making them special, and over time you get a group of people who think they deserve to rule others and treat them like second class citizens.”

  “People actually buy into that crap?” I asked, a little surprised.

  “Tyr, most of the kids being trained here grew up doing hard manual labor in the fields, or working for strict taskmasters in the trades,” said Meredith. “They live a much easier life here and wouldn’t go back to their old lives even if given the opportunity.”

  “So they accept that they were kidnapped and forced to work for their captors?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Except they don’t view it as a kidnapping, they see it as being freed from a life of obscurity and toil. They believe they have been called to the service of the church by god and that their powers are proof of that. They believe the story told to them because it feeds their deep seated need to be important and ge
t away from a life that they disliked.”

  “But I didn’t dislike my previous life,” I said.

  “You have to view it from Claudius’s perspective,” said Meredith. “To him you were living as just another dirt grubbing poor farmer in the middle of nowhere. Why wouldn’t you prefer to be an all-powerful priest and take over as the head of the inquisition when he retires or dies? Why wouldn’t you grow to accept it? After all, here you would be powerful and important, there you would just be another lowly peasant farmer.”

  “Lowly peasant farmer?!” I said, so shocked I couldn’t articulate my outrage.

  “In Claudius’s perspective, that’s exactly what you were,” she said. “A man who feels justified sending armed men to abduct children who had the misfortune of being born with magical gifts is just the sort of person who looks down on non-priests. Likely it helps him to sleep at night, thinking of it as saving poor unfortunate souls from a life of hard labor.”