“Dad,” Wayran groaned, “I’m in New Toeron, one of the biggest cities in Salucia, I don’t think I have to go to the Academy to meet women.” He had barely had any time for women. He had of course fantasised about one-day meeting someone who would take his breath away. He had even daydreamed that he and Ariel might eventually share a moment while on Deliverence, after he had become a full Storm Chaser of course. He would come back all dusty from a big storm, and then she’d be there... waiting for him.
Wayran shook himself from his dreaming. That was all gone now. “A relationship is the last thing on my mind right now.”
“Maybe not,” his father said with a smile, “and I didn’t say anything about a relationship, but you’ll meet a lot of strong, smart women there. The best young minds and bodies come from all over the nine nations to train there. You’ll meet people who dream big like you do, people who can challenge you.”
“Sure, you’re probably right.” Wayran was growing exasperated. “But that’s Matoh’s dream, and I …” He thought of his mother. She had fought for this, and the Academy was one of her dreams, which she helped to create; but part of him, deep down, blamed the military for taking his mother away from them. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to say it, so instead he said, “Well, what if we have to go to war? I don’t want to kill anyone.”
His father nodded at this, turning back to the trisk on the dummy. His fingers tugged at the suit slightly, making some minor adjustment. “I can understand that.” His father had to think about those words, and Wayran knew he had found a good point. “It is not an easy thing to kill, and it is something I wish my sons will never have to do. Yet sometimes it is justified.” Harold Spierling looked up from his idle work. His eyes grew distant and sad.
His father never spoke of the battles he had fought in during the Unification Wars. There was pain associated with those memories, and Wayran could see that pain now behind his father’s eyes.
“To defend, to protect those who cannot protect themselves from the violence imposed upon them. Those are reasons to kill,” his father said as he turned to him, “but it is my hope that you would not have to, in your time with the military. We are at peace. The Nine Realms have never known such stability. Most of a Syklan’s role is to keep the peace, to stop people from inciting violence. To uphold the High King’s laws, to serve and protect. That is not so bad. And I can think of no other place that will pay you to do so, while also giving you the kind of training and education many young men and women around the Nine Nations dream of.”
Wayran was running out of arguments. His father had him, he knew it, but every part of him wanted to resist. He could only imagine Matoh’s reaction. It would not be favourable to say the least.
Yet the more he thought about it, the more it began to make sense. It was a logical solution to many of his problems, which only fuelled his irritation.
His father must have seen some of his resistance dissolve, for he went to the door and opened it. “Think about it, son. Just promise me you’ll consider it. I really do think it is a good fit for you right now.”
“Isn’t it too late? This year’s initiates have already been chosen.” One final protest, though he knew it was weak.
His father shrugged. “I’ve already asked – your mother’s name was all I had to say. They’d take you in a heartbeat, plus it’s not like you wouldn’t be qualified. You have the skillset they are looking for anyways. There is a place there for you, if you will take it.”
Wayran shook his head, feeling outmanoeuvred and defeated. Nothing would top the pay he would get as an officer in training. He would have his living costs paid for and be earning a salary. He ran some quick numbers in his head; he could probably have his debt to Uncle Aaron paid off in the first three years of service; the next two years he would be making money. Easy enough to buy a new glider … and he could probably find time to continue his research on the Jendar. Maybe even enough of the old language to translate the book?
His father had always told him and Matoh that their mother had wanted them both going to the Academy. Back when she had said it, the Academy had only been a dream. Yet it had never been Wayran’s desire, a fact which made him feel guilty, made him feel like he didn’t deserve this potential place as an initiate. His motives weren’t pure, not like his mother’s dream had been, not like Matoh’s desire was.
He paused beside his father. “It just doesn’t feel right. I –”
“She’d be fine with it,” his father said. “Above all, your mother loved you very much. She would be happy to have created the opportunity for you. That’s what she truly fought for. To give you both the hope of a better future, Wayran. Trust me, you would have her blessing in this.”
Sometimes it felt like his father could see right through him. A lump in his throat grew as his anger vanished. He bowed his head, trying to hide his emotion. “Alright,” he whispered, “I’ll go.”
His father patted him on the shoulder as he left the inner workshop.
Wayran plodded through the larger workshop, past the apprentices, and reached the door leading to the stairs up to their house above. He grabbed the handle but something caught his eye out on the street.
A man was watching him. A large conical hat sheltered the man from the rain that was only now beginning to fall, and kept his face in shadow. As soon as he knew that he had been spotted, the man in the street turned to leave, but not before Wayran had caught a glimpse of something beneath the shadow of that hat.
Red swirling eyes had glared at him from that darkness.
He ran to the open side of the workshop.
But the man was gone, and Wayran could see no sign of him on the street.
Was he really there? But the thought provoked another headache, and he had to retreat and go back up to his room to take another dose of his medicine.
It couldn’t have been the man from the wastes. The headaches and stress were causing him to see things. He was just on edge was all.
10- Leaving Familiarity - Adel
The first successful attempts at integrating our specialised electric generating organs into new nervous systems were considered highly controversial to many in our society. I still laugh at this, for if they knew what else we did in the bowels of our glass towers, their common, uncomprehending minds would have been truly terrified.
They would have condemned us for playing God.
I look at my monitors now and want to tell them, we weren’t playing.
- Journal of Robert Mannford, Year 000 Day 002
Adel’s foot snapped up above her head. She sent her siphoned charge coursing through the thin disc of copper atop her foot sewn into her trisk. There was the familiar crackling sizzle of electric shock as her foot made contact, but it had been too slow.
The metal staff in her father’s hand blocked it, and Adel felt the blast of icy air as her father siphoned in, pulling the energy from her attack into his weapon.
Adel pushed the reserve of energy she held back into her next attack. It coursed through her other leg painfully, and the copper atop her foot grew hot, but the feint had worked. Her father had still been siphoning in and was caught off guard by the extra energy.
She continued her onslaught: a flurry of lightning kicks followed up the shock she had given her father. A foot arced overhead, her heel slammed into the top of her father’s staff, it came free of his hands and she flicked the weapon away.
Adel siphoned in hard and the tiny line of santsi globes running along the spine of her trisk sparkled bright blue. She landed the spinning kick, planted herself, and thrust forward with a twin palm strike.
This time, the energy snapped in the air from the contact points on her palms.
Her father toppled backwards. Another angry grunt escaped.
But her victory was short lived.
Her father tucked and rolled backwards up into his defensive stance. His eyes flashed dangerously. “Good.” He said the word almost as a growl. He had rolle
d and recovered the staff, which now began to whirl before her eyes. The santsi in his trisk lit with energy.
That small bit of praise was everything to Adel at that moment; it lifted her spirits like nothing else could.
The first staff strike came and she took it on her left armguard, siphoning in the energy her father was pushing into the attack. This dance of pushing, pulling, stealing and countering siphoned energy had now become as natural as breathing for Adel.
Her right armguard blocked the second strike. Adel had seen the shimmer of heat from the end of the staff and stopped siphoning, to prevent the overload. Shock, fire, or ice? Which will he use next?
She pivoted a step back, lifting her leg out of the way of another strike, and dropped to her knee and crossed her armguards overhead to catch the staff. She guessed wrong.
He used shock again, and her muscles froze for a split second.
Yet, that was all he had needed.
The thrust kick slammed into her chest. Adel felt the air leave her lungs as the strike threw her backwards, but she didn’t have any room to roll. The barn wall hit her back hard, and she heard the pop of some of the santsi in her trisk shattering.
It was all she could do to drop down as her father’s fist snapped into the wood where her head had been. She heard boards crack and thanked Halom it was the wood above her rather than her skull making that noise.
She thrust out with a leg from her sitting position and kicked the front of his knee, buckling his leg backwards. Yet instead of retracting the kick for another strike, she kept her foot on his knee and siphoned in hard through the copper pad on the bottom of her booted foot. Energy burned inside her body now instead of in the santsi as she had pulled too much, but Adel had pushed past this forbidden boundary before, and knew she could make her body use that extra energy.
As she kept siphoning in the energy from her father’s leg, his muscles stiffened as if he had been sitting in the snow for hours, stiffened enough to prevent a counter, and it gave Adel the split second she needed to sweep forward with her other leg as she pushed hard away from the wall.
Her father fell. She heard another crunch as some of his santsi popped, and she jumped onto his hips before he could set up a leg guard.
An elbow smashed up against the side of her head, her world spun, but Adel held her position and slammed her forehead down onto her father’s chest before the next attack came. Her open palm snapped into his ribs and forced all the energy she held through into a shock strike.
Her father’s body went rigid and she took advantage of the opening to rise up and slam down with both hands onto his exposed face.
It stunned him, blood ran from his nose, but Adel could already feel him try to twist beneath her, to buck out of her mounted position. A knee slammed into her back, knocking her forward.
She ducked her head down as again an elbow strike snaked up from the ground, but it missed as she was too close to his body.
She couldn’t take much more of this. He was too strong.
Her knife flicked out of its sheath on her hip. Its blade rested against his exposed neck. Adel siphoned all of the energy she had left into the blade, making it burn hot.
Her father stopped twisting.
“You should have had the knife out as soon as you mounted.” Leonard Corbin’s hard, icy eyes looked up at Adel. The burning blade on his throat did nothing to affect the stony gaze. She could have been holding a feather to his throat for all the surrender he showed.
“Yes, father.” She stopped siphoning, feeling drained, feeling like she was ready to drop, but she knew she couldn’t. The lesson was not yet finished.
“Why did you hesitate?” her father questioned.
“I don’t know, sir.” Adel shook her head, ashamed. She could already see the red burn mark in the shape of her knife blade on the skin of his neck. He would have an ugly scar from that, and it made her almost sick to think of it. But he would have been disappointed if she had done anything else.
“Will your enemy hesitate?” His eyes bore into her. She could tell no lie under that gaze.
“No, sir.” She gulped. The pain in her face from the elbow strike was warm. Whether it bruised or welted mattered not. She had been hit several times this lesson. Each one was a failure. She had to do better.
“You were distracted.” The almost unperceivable nod of his head signalled the lesson’s end. She rolled off him, and her father got to his feet.
Adel said nothing in response to his observation. She knew it was true.
“A lot of energy was needed to freeze my knee like that.” Her father’s statement insinuated and accused all at once.
Adel knew there was no point hiding the truth. He would know the lie before it left her lips. “I didn’t use the trisk,” she admitted.
Even now she could feel the residual energy tingling through her body.
Her father clenched his jaw and looked down at the wooden floor of his barn, a barn which housed no animals except the one horse and a goat, both in the far stable. He seemed to be considering something.
“How many times now?” He went to grab a cloth from the rail. He wiped the blood from his face and held the cloth to his nose calmly. This was nowhere near the first time they had needed to stop blood from flowing during a lesson.
“Twelve,” Adel answered.
“You will need to find Fellow Callahan at the Academy.” Her father shook his head and continued, “He is an expert in the unnatural.”
Leonard Corbin looked sad, and Adel had never seen him sad before. It scared her. “Yes, I will, sir. I’m sorry, I don’t understand how I can siphon in beyond the limit and control it.”
“Halom has chosen to make you his servant ...” Her father trailed off and went to the far wall of the barn to bend down to the floor. He poked a finger into a wooden knot in the board and Adel straightened in shock as she heard a click as the floorboard sank into the ground and rolled away. She heard the whirring of metal gears for a moment and then, there, beneath the floorboard, was a long metal safe concreted into the foundation of the barn.
Her father reached under his shirt and pulled out his necklace with the somewhat eccentric metallic Singer symbol of a man with two hands held skyward. The odd bit was that this symbol also had a crown over the man’s head, whereas all other icons she had seen were missing the crown.
To her surprise, her father undid the leather thong holding the symbol, turned the metal object upside down and slid it neatly into a small hole on the safe.
It was a key. He had been wearing a key around his neck all these years.
“Father, what is all this? How long has that been here? What’s inside?” Adel asked with wonder and trepidation.
Instead of answering, her father pulled a long cloth-wrapped object from the safe. He pulled the cloth and Adel saw the long black enamelled shape as it fell away.
A sword; and one which had a presence. It felt as if a demon had just been conjured into the room and was staring at her with lidless eyes.
Her father touched the sword’s pommel to his head and closed his eyes. Adel caught the hint of a prayer on his lips, and then he pulled the sword blade half free of the scabbard. Only then did she notice that the sword was also completely black, a black so dark that the light itself looked as if it faltered around it. “Halom has chosen to make you his servant, just as he chose me so many years ago.”
The words sounded like a ritual to her. Her father looked her in the eye and then ran a thumb along the edge of the blade, drawing blood.
“You can do what I do?” Adel asked, confused.
“No, my gifts were different, but I know enough to recognise His touch when I see it.” Her father watched the droplet of his blood touch the sword with such intensity, it was as if his life depended on it. In a trick of the light, it looked almost as if the sword drank in his blood. Her father grimaced and dropped down to both knees and closed his eyes.
“Father, you’re scaring me ...�
�� Adel could feel the tears in her eyes now, and she couldn’t stop them. She hadn’t meant to use this horrible form of siphoning. It had just started happening to her.
“It’s alright, my child.” Her father snapped the blade back into its scabbard. He bowed and presented the sword to her with open palms. “This is Halom’s instrument, and with it, you will judge the wicked. Adel, this blade is your birthright, but not only that, it will help you with this new power you struggle with. Take it.”
Adel knew her father was bestowing a great honour on her, but she hesitated. She could feel the power of the blade he held, and it scared her.
“Adel …” There was urgency in her father’s voice now; he kept his head bowed, but she saw his cut hand falter as if it wanted to grab the pommel once more. “Adel, I …”
She grabbed the proffered sword and immediately felt her body cool. Only then did she realise she had still been siphoning. Her heart pounded, to think how close she must have been to burning herself out.
Her father released the blade and his arms slumped to the floor as if drained of their strength.
“The sword adds another measure of control to some people’s abilities,” he said in a breathless voice, “and it can hold more than any santsi globe; ten times more. It will help keep you safe.” He looked at the sword with a strange sadness, as if he were saying goodbye to an old friend. The gash across his thumb was forgotten.
Leonard Corbin got to his feet and put his hand on his daughter’s shoulders. “That blade is more than a sword. For me, it helped clarify my path. It was as if, while holding the sword, all the wicked magics of the world melted away and I would suddenly know what needed to be done.” His eyes went distant then, as if he remembered past glories. “You will have more training at the Academy than just that of a Syklan in the High King’s army. You are Halom’s chosen warrior. Fellow Callahan will help you unlock your true potential. He is an ally and a true believer.”
Visions: Knights of Salucia - Book 1 Page 14
