by Devin Hanson
He got a good breakfast in the inn's common room, paying two of his small copper commons for a rasher of bacon and a heap of some sort of eggs-and-potatoes scramble. It was good enough that he considered asking for a second helping, but decided walking around on an over-full stomach would make his day more uncomfortable than it was worth.
The Academy Alchemic was a sprawling structure, like some overly-industrious mason with a castle fetish had strung a half-dozen normal castles around the circumference of the mountain top then filled in the middle with a messy network of patios, towers, arcades, dormitories and lecture halls. Despite the apparent lack of organization in the planning, the Academy had a clear "front", which faced toward Salia and points south.
Without any real guidance on how to apply to the Academy, Andrew headed to the front. As he followed the instructions of passing locals, the buildings he passed performed the same sort of rarification that he had observed in the Merchant Quarter. The facades grew finer, the quality of the clothes people were wearing went up and despite it not being the Merchant Quarter, he began seeing the sorts of stores that catered to alchemists: glass blowers, jewelers, chemists, and the like.
The entrance to the Academy here was a wide double portcullis, with a span sufficient to allow two ox-driven wagon teams to pass each other comfortable and with room to spare. A small booth was set up in the middle. To the right, people came and went freely, but flashed some sort of badge or crest to the uniformed gentleman manning the booth. To the left, wagons, carts and people were let in and out, but were subjected to a more strenuous vetting process.
Andrew watched the two groups filtering in and out of the Academy for a while, before making his approach to an older man in a frock coat with what looked like a semi-formal scarf hung about his neck. It didn't serve any purpose beyond looking fancy, so Andrew assumed it was ceremonial in nature, or a badge of office. The old man passed out of the Academy on the right with only a nod to the guard. His face looked kind, and he didn't seem in a particular hurry.
"Excuse me!" he called as the man passed. "Hello. Sorry, excuse me." Andrew caught the man's attention with a bit of hand waving. "My apologies. I don't mean to disturb you, but I have a question, if you have the time."
The man approached Andrew, his face set with an expression of polite enquiry. "Certainly, young man. How may I help you?"
"You work at the Academy?" Andrew asked. It wasn't the question he wanted to ask, but the man's clothing had piqued his curiosity.
The man lifted the tails of his scarf in demonstration with a wry smile. "I do. A professor, in fact. Milkin in my name."
"Oh, hi. Sorry. Andrew Condign."
"A pleasure, mister Condign. What can I do for you?"
"I just arrived in the city," Andrew said, generalizing a little bit. The professor didn't need to know his life story, after all. "And I was wondering how I might go about joining the Academy."
"Ah, a prospective student!" Professor Milkin's expression changed from polite to interested. "You could certainly have done worse than start by asking me. May I ask, what caused you to pick me out of the crowd?"
Andrew shrugged, baffled. "I, well, I'm not sure, sir. You seemed like the right person to ask."
"Indulge me." The professor's tone was firm, the tone of a man who often got young men and women to answer his questions promptly.
"Ah," Andrew thought back to his first glimpse of the professor. "The gate guard treated you differently. A friendly respect rather than-" he stopped, blushing.
"Go on."
"Well, the guard was either bored or just a little bit scared of everyone he spoke to. You were the only one he seemed to like. At least while I was watching. And the way you walk, as well. You know where you're going, yet you were looking about, seeing what was going on now, rather than lost in thought or planning. And, well, you looked friendly."
"All that?" The professor's eyebrow raised. "You have high standards for who you speak to."
"Ah, no, sorry. I mean, I do. Wait. No? I don't. But-"
"Relax. I'm teasing you." Milkin's eyes twinkled under his beetling eyebrows. "You're a perceptive lad, aren't you."
Andrew shrugged. Nobody had ever had cause to mention it as such. "I don't know. Sure, I guess."
"Tell me, mister Condign, why do you want to learn alchemy? Fame? Power? Money?"
Andrew thought about the reasons why he had joined the fleet crews, and almost said ‘to drive the dragons from the skies', but that wasn't really the reason he had joined. "To make the land safe for people." As soon as it left his mouth, he wanted to take it back. It sounded so pretentious when it was said aloud.
Milkin grunted noncommittally. Andrew couldn't tell whether his answer was good, bad, or if the professor had rejected it because it sounded pompous, or what. "Well. You'll certainly be in the minority. Do you have a flux?"
"A what?"
"A flux. A store of vitae."
"Ah, I didn't know I needed one."
"If you're going to learn alchemy," Milkin pointed out, "you need to be able to perform the actions. Most prospective students either have a flux or a sponsor who will fund the purchase of dragongas during the course of their studies." The professor's keen gaze swept over Andrew from head to toe. "You do not have a sponsor."
Andrew shook his head. "No, Professor." A minute narrowing of the professor's eyes, and his gaze directed behind Andrew told him that someone had approached from behind.
"Picking up another stray, Milkin?" The voice was haughty, deep and refined, and Andrew could already see the speaker's head tilting back, the curled lip, the expensive clothes. Milkin caught Andrew's eye and gave a tiny shake of his head.
"Ah, my Lord Priah," Milkin said smoothly, his voice picking up a steely undercurrent that hadn't been there before, "Have you returned to finish your education?"
Andrew turned around and saw almost exactly what his mind's eye had predicted based on the voice. Lord Priah was a tall man, nearly as tall as Andrew was, with manicured good looks. His hair was light brown, greased into a fashionable wave. His teeth were white and even, though his lips were thin and permanently pulled back in a sneer that exposed his front teeth. He was clean shaven and dressed in a suit of clothing that cost more than Andrew's parents made in a good year. Andrew hated him immediately.
"I've graduated, as you well know. I'm here on business."
"Of course, of course. On the behest of your father, I assume."
"Mind yourself, Milkin." Lord Priah's voice was calm, but Andrew could hear the brittle anger riding beneath. "And get rid of the brat. The Academy isn't a charity. I better not see him around here or I'll have him thrown out. Or in prison. Whichever is easier." He turned on his heel and jerked his head at the two men-at-arms following him.
Andrew watched him go through the gate without even looking at the guard manning the booth.
"Well." Milkin said, his voice back to a friendly baritone. "That was Trent Priah. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have done you any favors here. Trent's good for his word, at least in this. The man's a snake, filthy rich and has more strings to pull in this city than a basket of marionettes."
"But why?" Andrew asked, "I'm nobody. Why would he care if I was in the Academy?"
"He cares because of me. He wouldn't look twice at you otherwise, but he'd go a great distance to spite me." Milkin chuckled and shook his head. "It's not like I could have gotten you entry into the Academy anyway. That was a one-time thing, not something I have the power to grant."
Andrew nodded. "So, I guess I have to get into the Academy on my own. I need to buy a flux?"
Milkin chuckled again. "Yes, though it would be cheaper to buy dragongas."
"Well," Andrew patted his purse, "I have some money. How much do I need to buy to get in?"
"An unusual approach, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. I think twenty vials would suffice."
"Okay, and that would be?"
"If you buy them at the right time, five.
Five royals."
Andrew's jaw dropped. If the conversion was the same here as in Ardhal, it was twenty nobles to a royal, plus the money-changer's fee. Over twice what Andrew had to hand.
"Five royals a vial," Milkin added.
It was impossible. Twenty vials? That was a hundred royals! Andrew didn't know exactly how much his commission with the fleet had cost, but it couldn't have been half that amount. His heart crashed into his boots.
"Most students get a sponsor," Milkin said gently.
"What about a flux, then?" Andrew asked, desperate.
Milkin shook his head. "They might as well be priceless. They can be bought, but they're more valuable than the vitae they contain. They can be found, of course. Dragon scales are fairly common, as fluxes go. You wouldn't need to have a tooth or a bone."
"Oh." Andrew looked up at the high walls of the Academy looming over him. Entrance into those halls of learning suddenly seemed permanently out of reach. "Okay. It was a pleasure meeting you, Professor."
Andrew shook the professor's hand, and started walking back down the hill. So much for getting into the Academy. He remembered the flippant way Michael had described his own entrance, and came to the realization that Michael was either the child of nobility or had very wealthy parents. Or a sponsor. Andrew didn't know anyone. He had nobody he could turn to for assistance in finding a sponsor. Nobody who could introduce him, nobody to even point him in the right direction.
He wandered the city for the rest of the morning. He told himself he was looking for possible opportunities for work, but he knew better. Any sort of manual labor job he was likely to find wouldn't pay more than a dozen nobles a week. After living expenses, he'd be lucky to save up the hundred royals by the time he died.
Other options were available. His background in merchanting would make him valuable to a wholesaler beyond just being a clerk. He'd be turning sixteen next month, and would be old enough to apply for a guild license and drive wagons. Those jobs would pay much better, and it was possible he could save enough within a few years to purchase admittance into the Academy.
The prospect of slaving away for three or four years, working long hours and the constant effort of keeping his expenditure to a minimum was enough to nearly make him give up altogether.
He bought lunch from a street vendor for a clipped common and ate it without tasting the food or even really registering what it was.
By the time the sky was darkening into evening, Andrew had wandered all the way around to the north side of the city by the gates. He was looking for a likely merchant, someone who dealt with a lot of imported goods, and who would have reason to value Andrew's experience traveling abroad with his parents' wagon train.
He watched a wagon unload, trying to get a sense of what the merchant's goods were. Sacks of grain, rolled bales of wool, quarried stone. Local goods. Andrew sighed. He was on the wrong side of the city. Andronath was one of the northernmost cities on the continent, and there was nothing to the north but mountains and dragons and snow.
A call rose up from the walls, and the portcullis gates were winched up. Andrew's interested peaked. There wasn't any long-distance commerce coming through this gate this late in the day, not with the sun almost set, and locals would have stayed at home rather than risk being caught out after dark. Andronath might be safe, but being stuck on the road this close to dragon territory was a death sentence for sure.
It wasn't just a single wagon that rolled through the gate. Rather it was a whole caravan, a dozen wagons in all, pulled by horses. The wagons were open, with a half dozen men sitting on benches. The horses were blowing and lathered from a hard run. In any other city, an arrival this close to dark would have been cause for an uproar, as people rushed to get the caravan under eaves before the last of the light failed. Even in Andronath, it should have been cause for comment, but none of the people around Andrew so much as looked in their direction.
A common occurrence then, something that happened often enough that the locals thought it completely ordinary. As the wagons rolled by, Andrew caught a strong breath of cinnamon in their wake.
Cinnamon! The smell meant dragons, for a certainty. Images of burning airships lurked behind Andrew's eyes and he shook his head trying to clear his thoughts. He stared after the caravan for a minute before his mind put the pieces together. The caravan had come from the north, dragon country, and drawn by horses for speed, so they had come a long way quickly. With the scent of dragons heavy on them, they could only have been doing one thing: collecting dragon dung.
Slowly Andrew pieced it together. The wagons would leave first thing in the morning with the sun just peeking over the horizon. Horses meant the wagons could travel a long distance quickly, probably far into the mountain ranges to the north. The men in the back would climb the mountains, collecting dung, to bring it back to Andronath where it would be refined into dragongas.
It was a dangerous job. Dragons usually only came out at night to hunt, but that deep into dragon territory, you'd have to keep one eye on the sky at all times. Now that he thought about it, the men in the back of the wagons had all worn similar cloaks, carefully dyed and worked to resemble natural stone, an essential protection when working out in the open like that.
What did Milkin say? Fluxes could be found. Dragon scales. If there was anyone who was likely to find a dragon scale, it would be one of the dung collectors. Who else was regularly traveling deep into dragon territory? Who else made it their specialty to go where dragons were most common?
Abruptly, Andrew knew what he was going to do. Burn trying to work a common job and save up over the course of years. He'd get a job with the dung collectors and find a flux. How long could it possibly take?
Chapter 6
Collector
Andrew tugged his cloak a little closer around his shoulders as the sleet started up again. The wagon jostled against an overturned cobblestone and someone cursed then coughed wetly. The pair of horses drawing the wagon moved at a rapid canter and this high in the mountains the roads were patchy and hadn't seen maintenance in years.
Packed around Andrew, three men and two women were hunched on the benches, their cloaks tight about them against the chill. The northern faces of the mountains were patchy with snow and the peaks an hour's journey to the north still had full caps. A frigid wind gusted sporadically, blowing the freezing sleet into Andrew's face. He ducked his head down and pulled his hood forward.
It had been two and a half years since Andrew had walked out of Shen's borrowed office in the warehouse. He still had the same cloak, but it was threadbare and heavily patched. The fabric had been worked repeatedly as the rocky mountain faces changed with the seasons. In the spring, he had learned to pile fresh grasses onto his cloak, roll it up and twist it until the green juices ran from the cloth. In the fall, he rubbed dirt and dead leaves in, scrubbed it through mud and sand. It was winter now, and Andrew's cloak was bleached to a patchy grey-white using ashes from a camp fire.
The boots he had once been proud of were falling apart, the soles worn thin and the leather cracked. It was a minor miracle they were still intact at all and every day he blessed the cobbler who had built them to last. On his hands he wore a pair of old socks rubbed thick with tallow, with holes for his pinky and ring fingers, middle and pointer fingers, and thumb. They weren't as warm as gloves, but they kept him from getting frostbite so long as they stayed somewhat dry. Beneath his cloak, he had a large gunny sack wrapped around his torso: triple-folded canvas with a pair of heavy shoulder straps. Of all his clothing, the gunny sack was the warmest and in the best repair. It wasn't surprising, really. The gunny sack didn't belong to him, in fact was the property of the wagon driver, a dull brute named Ivan. Ivan had a protruding brow, bristling hair of uniform length covering nearly his entire body, and an average intelligence just high enough to keep the horses on the road.
To and a half years had made the dream of finding a flux and joining the Academy Alchemic very clearly e
xactly that: a dream. The was the dream of an idealistic child. He had the same likelihood of stumbling across a dragon scale as a buried pot of gold. Now, if Andrew had any hopes, it was that he would find a fresh dragon patty first and fill his gunny quickly, to return to the wagon and rest in peace for an hour or two. He made little in the way of extra money, and that only when he was lucky with the size and freshness of the droppings he found. Maybe today he'd score big and could purchase a pair of second-hand pants to add to his wardrobe.
The wagon rumbled to a stop and Andrew swung over the side, his muscles stiff from the long cold ride. The two and a half years had not been kind to Andrew. He was taller now that he was on his first arrival to Andronath, topping out at six feet and seven inches. Constant climbing up and down mountains had made him strong, but borderline malnutrition had left him lean, his muscles wiry.
Ivan had stopped the wagon under a sheltered overhang framed by a pair of stunted pine trees where the horses could stay out of the wind and out of sight of a passing dragon. Andrew cast about, sizing up the terrain. Experience had taught him likely places to find dung deposits. Dragons tended to hunt their prey, goats, deer, the occasional mountain lion, defecate then fly off, so good places to find the deposits would be near where the larger animals tended to live.
The pass Andrew found himself in had only a scattering of trees, so deer weren't likely to be found nearby. Goats could, and would, live wherever there was sufficient forage. While the deer might shun this part of the mountain, there was plenty for goats to eat. The other gatherers had left the side of the wagon and had started picking their way up the mountain, each heading toward where they thought a likely place might be. Andrew sighed and followed. Two and a half years and he was still terrible at finding fresh dung.
