Students of the Order

by Edward W. Robertson

  After ten minutes of following a well known network of twisting streets and little alleyways, Wit was home. The Adepts' quarters was a shabby single story building on the outer edge of the old city, off of a wide street that ran between a human and dwarven quarter. The front door opened onto a sitting room, which had a few battered chairs and couches arranged around a fireplace, and a wide ink-stained wooden table, with mismatched chairs, for spreading out books and taking notes. Opening into this room was a neglected kitchen, with a few chipped and dirty dishes and many empty bottles of beer. A wide empty hall led into the back of the building, and the Adepts' cells opened onto this hall. There were ten cells, but the quarters had never housed more than six students in the time that Wit had been there.

  Wit let himself into the sitting room. Mantyger and Bronzino were reading by the fire. Wit leaned the staff in a corner and carried the food and gin to the table by the fireplace.

  Bronzino blinked at the sight of the jug, and scanned the room until his eyes rested on the staff, and nearly doubled in size. "Holy shit…holy shit!"

  Mantyger looked up from her book, and then dropped it, as Bronzino flung himself around Wit. She had the sense to take the jug and put it safely on the floor, before joining in the embrace. Then Wit was sitting in one of the chairs, Bronzino was running into the kitchen for cups, and Mantyger was running down the hall screaming "Wit's a wizard! They made Wit a wizard!"

  "It might only be until I get back," he said, as Haniel rushed into the room, the bread and sausages retrieved from the floor, and the gin and cups were passed around. He described, as quickly as he could, the Youngkent Contract, his mission to Reading and Cohos, and the circumstances of his promotion.

  Bronzino offered him a piece of the sausage. "No thanks," said Wit, "I just had a very good dinner with a very mad dwarf."

  "Mad?"

  "Yes. He thinks that the hills of the east are paradise and that if I ever leave 'wen, Lord Lexus might try to kill me."

  "In that case," said Mantyger, "Cardozo might be mad as well. There could be something to the Lord Lexus thing, or he wouldn't have given you Wa'llach as an expert. I've known him for the last four years—there are not many alive with a Binding as old as his, and it's very interesting—and he is one of the most deadly beings in the Alliance, and definitely who you would want riding with you if Lexus were to try something."

  "What do you know about him? What do you even have to do to get Bound for 180 years?"

  "What he didn't do would be shorter," Mantyger said. "His people were displaced dwarven heretics, of some sort, who settled with humans in the north hundreds of years ago, and are deeply unpopular with most other dwarves for the most involved and dwarvish of reasons—but Wa'llach is just a bandit and a thief. His own people kicked him out of the north nearly 150 years ago, and he spent the next seventy years raising hell all over the Alliance. At one point he even teamed up with a band of orcs and helped them sell human livers, which are apparently a delicacy to orcs. Almost everyone thought 180 years was lenient."

  Bronzino shook his head. "He gave you Wa'llach because you are too good a wizard to risk losing to a mountain troll or some nonsense. Lexus is not mad enough to harm one of us."

  "He makes mountains of gold whenever he takes someone in contribution," said Haniel.

  "That's true," said Wit.

  "And he knows it damn well. Do you ever wonder why his carters are all drunks or simpletons?"

  "He doesn't like to pay them," said Bronzino, "and those will work for cheap."

  "And he knows that those will give him the best chance to claim a man in contribution." Haniel twisted her face in disgust. "It's a travesty that the Order lets him get away with it."

  "What would you have us do about it?" asked Mantyger.

  Haniel shrugged. "It's Our Power—we can do with it what we want. We could Bind Lexus and send him to the ghoul pasture. Then whoever succeeds to his holding will hire their carters with a little more care."

  "No," said Wit. "Our Power is nothing, unless one invokes it in a Controversy—and we may Bind no being that has the gold to pay the damage. Lord Lexus has far too much gold to have any fear of a Binding."

  "Are you so sure?" asked Haniel. "The Elder Wizards teach us how to use Our Power—and the Elder Wizards are sitting on a great pile of gold, all gotten from Lord Lexus and the like. Perhaps they could Bind him, if they had any interest in doing so."

  Wit drank some more gin. "Has anyone heard of the Aubrey?"

  "What's an Aubrey?" asked Haniel.

  "I am, apparently."

  Bronzino said, "I read of them—a tribe of the sea, where everyone can do magic. They still provide important trade to the coastal cities and were a great empire once. Some say that they indirectly caused the forming of the Order and the Alliance."

  Mantyger laughed and shook her head. "It's just a silly legend."

  "What is it?" asked Wit.

  "Well, what they say, is that before the Alliance, the High Dragars and the Great Dwarves desired peace with humans, to unite against the orcs," said Bronzino, "but the humans were so divided amongst themselves that the dragars and dwarves couldn't recognize anyone as the leaders of men. At the time, the Lord of Goodstien had the most powerful kingdom, and if he had gone to the dragars and dwarves they could have founded the Alliance then and there. But Goodstien hated dragars and dwarves as much as he did orcs. Goodstien's daughter was said to be the most beautiful woman in the land, and many lords hoped to win her hand. Among these lords was Sprence, the lord of a small, wretched province, that shared a border with Goodstien along the ocean.

  "Sprence wanted to win Goodstien's daughter, as much for her beauty as because he wanted to unite his province with Goodstien's and lead the humans into the Alliance. But although he was brave and wise, he was also obscure and impoverished, and seemed to have no chance of winning her hand. He hung around Goodstien's castle hoping for he did not know what.

  "The daughter was so beautiful that she had also captured the heart of an Aubrey captain who spied her while she was walking along the sea shore. The Aubrey trained an Oct-o-puss…"

  "Like those skirbits had in their tank?" asked Haniel. A month ago they had been to a carnival, where some traveling skirbits had been displaying something that they claimed was an Oct-o-puss.

  "No," said Wit, very slowly. "That wasn't an Oct-o-puss at all. I guess I must have seen a real one when I was small—I feel very certain that it was not a real one in the tank." He noticed Mantyger's round mouth curling into a secret smile. He tried to see what she was thinking, but she did not want him to.

  "I read about them more after we saw the thing at the carnival," Mantyger said. "Apparently, the Aubrey find the living ones amazingly useful: here the legend says they trained one to grab the princess from the beach and carry her to the Aubrey's ship. What they use them for, generally, I don't know—but probably something else, since it was not a successful kidnapping: Sprence had been watching and attacked the monster with no thought of his own safety, driving it back into the deep. Afterwards, the princess would think of marrying no one but Sprence, the two houses were united, and Sprence lead the humans into the Alliance."

  "My people are incompetent abductors?" Wit asked dejectedly.

  "It's just a silly story," said Mantyger. She looked at Wit thoughtfully. "It makes sense."

  "What?!"

  "No, I mean I've never seen anyone who looks like you. Have you?"

  "No," said Wit. "Someone told me I was from somewhere very far away, but my parents were gone and I belonged to the Order… I just assumed it was a part of the Alliance that I had never been to."

  They all nodded. The wizards of the Order came from all parts of the Alliance and did not bear any physical resemblance to each other. Bronzino and Mantyger had the tan skin, dark hair, and round features of westerners, although Bronzino's hair was curly, and Mantyger's was straight. She was of medium height and voluptuous, while he was tall and thin—making him
most likely from the northwest, and she from further south. Haniel, on the other hand, had pale skin, sharp, delicate features, narrow eyes, and a high forehead—typical of the people of the east. She also had the taught muscles and battered hands of a fighter, which provided an odd contrast with her delicate face.

  "Do you remember them?" asked Haniel.

  Wit shook his head. "The Order has had me as long as I can remember, I think."

  "Hang on," Bronzino said, "If the Order has always had you how did they know you had the Gift?"

  "If all my people have it, I guess they assumed."

  "I Bound my father to my cat," said Mantyger. "I didn't know what I was doing, of course."

  Bronzino blinked. "I did not know that"—heads were shaken; none of them had—"I've spoken to you about Binding for days, we all have, you're a genius at it…you never told us."

  Mantyger shrugged. "We were talking about Binding people to people, not to cats. How did you come to the Order?" she asked him. Bronzino reached for the bottle of gin and filled his cup.

  "How are your father and the cat?" asked Wit.

  "Well, I think, although of course I have not been home. I hear he spends most of his time fetching saucers of milk. But wizards will pass by and look at him—there are only half a dozen people that have ever been Bound to an animal—and they give him a few pieces of gold, which should make him happy."

  Bronzino coughed and put down an empty cup. "I was four. I saw into my mother's mind, and I asked my father why she lived with us, if she loved the carpenter…he beat her to death, and our lord hanged him and sent me to the Order." He refilled his cup.

  "I killed a man," said Haniel. "He was walking down the road, I didn't know him, but suddenly I could see in him…and then I could do things to him, make him move an arm, make him crawl. Of course, more of him slipped away the longer I meddled, until he forgot how to breathe…these are not nice stories, it's no wonder we don't tell them."

  Wit shook his head. "We spend so much of ourselves in the minds of others, how wise is it to look too deeply into our own?"

  Bronzino nodded. "The Order is who we are now."

  When Wit had arrived at the Adepts' quarters, three years earlier, Mantyger was already there, along with three more Adepts. Two of these had become wizards, and the third had died. One of the wizards, Castilo, was posted in the capital, and never had much to do with the Adepts, unless it was to get Mantyger to help him with a Binding. The other, Rickmund, had been sent to dragar land, on a thirty-year post. The first mid-winter after he left he had sent the Adepts a barrel of nice skirbit wine; and six months later Bronzino, with whom he had been close, got a fairly thoughtful letter; he had not been heard from since.

  Bronzino and Haniel had both arrived shortly after Wit, and the Adepts were the only people their age that any of them had ever spent a significant amount of time with. When they first came to the capital, Gifted children would live in the household of one of a handful of older wizards, who had retired to limited duties. When they turned eight, they were sent out to one of the Order's other outposts in the Alliance, where they would spend most of their time with an older wizard who would instruct them. Depending on their progress, and the whims of the Order, they would then either get sent to another outpost or back to the capital as an Adept. Wit had been posted for several years in a small dusty city on one of the major roads to the swamps of dragar land, before becoming an Adept at sixteen.

  He thought that it was terribly shabby of Castilo to have essentially ignored the other Adepts since his promotion. Wit promised himself that, if he was able to keep his staff after the journey, he would have the Adepts over to his room in the tower for the best dinner that he could afford to give them.

  Bronzino offered Wit the bottle of gin, and Wit shook his head. "Oh, no, I've probably had enough as it is. Cardozo wants me to meet his murderous dwarf first thing, and who knows what else."

  "Wait," said Haniel, "If you are leaving tomorrow, we should… one last time."

  "Not the last," said Wit, "but yes." He sat back down. He looked into Mantyger's eyes, and then Bronzino's and then Haniel.

  "Will you follow me?" Bronzino asked.

  "Yes," the other three said as one.

  They were in the same room, all of them except Haniel, who would not arrive for another month. Someone had given the Adepts a griffin leg, perhaps as a joke, but Wit and Mantyger were gamely trying to wrestle it into something edible in the kitchen. Bronzino was talking to Rickmund, and Castilo was reading by the fire.

  There was a knock on the door which Rickmund answered. Two Bound men were supporting the other Adept. They dropped him into Rickmund's arms, turned, and walked away. Bronzino and Castilo helped Rickmund take the other Adept into the sitting room and spread him out on the one couch. Mantyger and Wit ran in from the kitchen.

  The Adept's face was ghostly white, his breathing was shallow. He responded to neither words, nor touches, but just lay there with his eyes half open, staring at the ceiling.

  "We need to get help," said Castilo.

  Wit shook his head. "If he was meant to get help, they would not have brought him here. We either help him, or…"

  Mantyger nodded. "It's true, he was one of us, and now his fate is in our hands."

  They all nodded. To accept without question the situations that the Order put them in was one of the first lessons they had learned.

  "What happened to him?" asked Bronzino.

  "A Binding gone wrong, most likely," said Mantyger. "If you do them very, very wrong the Binder's mind and the mind of the person you're Binding can get jumbled up until neither of them work."

  "One of us should…go," said Rickmund.

  "I think we all should," said Bronzino.

  They nodded. They stood around the couch in a circle. Bronzino, standing next to Wit, took his hand, and Wit took the hand of Rickmund, on his other side, until they were all holding hands. Physical contact, of course, was not necessary or very relevant, but they did it this time anyway.

  The memory they found themselves in was not the Adept's. It belonged to a dragar, and consisted simply of the creature floating in the mud, with its eyes closed, the glaring heat of the sun almost visible through closed eyes. Very slowly, the creature opened its eyes to blinding light, and then, slowly, indulgently, closed them again and rolled over so that its face was buried in the dark water. Then the memory would go back to the beginning, the creature floating in the sun with closed eyes.

  Wit turned to Mantyger, "Where's the rest of him?"

  "The Adept or the dragar?"

  "Anyone!"

  "This is all there is," Bronzino said, nearly hysterical. "This is just all there is."

  They left the Adept's mind. "What do we do?" said Rickmund.

  "I'm done," said Castilo. "I did not do this to him, and I don't know how to fix it." He picked up a book and went to his cell.

  Wit got a cup of water and tried to see if the Adept would drink. He would not.

  "What do we do?"

  Mantyger and Bronzino got out books and read desperately, looking for any mention of the condition or a cure. Wit and Rickmund sat by him, sometimes trying to get him to drink, fetching things to assist the researchers, and, sometimes, looking into the morbid little loop that was his mind. At dawn, nothing had changed, and the Adepts went about their daily tasks. None of the older wizards ever referred to that Adept, or was anything less than customarily exacting towards the others. They were mocked and chided, as always, for minor failures—and then they came home to the comatose Adept. Bronzino pointed Wit to where he had left off in the research, and curled up and slept on the floor. Mantyger sat with the Adept, and Rickmund took over her book. After an hour or two Bronzino woke, Wit sat with the Adept, and Mantyger slept.

  It went on like that for days. They carried out their duties by day, and in the night, conducted a never-ending vigil. On the second night, Castilo relented and joined in, reading and watching with the rest o
f them.

  But the Adept's pulse grew weaker, and their researches yielded nothing. They found the condition described several times, but there was never any mention of a cure. The Order did not like to extensively document failures, but it seemed that when a Binding went that far wrong there was no coming back.

  The Power had a beneficial, if unpredictable, effect on the bodies of the Gifted. Barring a violent death, wizards were almost always at least twice as long lived as normal humans, and could be sustained by the Power itself, in the absence of food or water, for a potentially indefinite period. So, as the Adept weakened, as his lips grew black with thirst, it was not clear that he was actually any closer to death.

  Wit awoke from a brief nap on the night of the sixth day to the sound of Mantyger sharpening a knife and Castilo crying, and Wit cried for a moment too.

  "Should I get a basin?" asked Bronzino.

  "I guess," said Mantyger.

  Bronzino sniffled as he walked to the kitchen. Wit collected himself and took one last look at the mud, the sun and the water, and the nothing that surrounded it. Wit brushed the Adept's hair off of his face, Rickmund held his head in place, Bronzino knelt with the basin, and Mantyger slit his throat.

  Haniel had arrived a week later and dumped her things in the late Adept's room while everyone else was out. When they came home, they shared the memory of the late Adept's last days with her, and then helped her carry her things into another cell. No one had taught them the ritual or ever discussed anything about the episode with them, but from that point on they would collectively relive their memories of the Adept's last days, about once a month. At this point, the sensations and lessons, whatever they might have been, were as deeply a part of Haniel as those who had actually lived through it.

  Wit got up and walked down the hall to his cell, undressed and fell in bed. He had expected that after his sleepless night and long day, he would have slept immediately, but instead his mind kept pulling back to his earliest memories—the house in the capital, and the kindly face of Lorenzo, the wizard who had taken him in. But was there something before that? A woman's face half suggested itself to him, but then retreated, a face that he could never remember having seen before, yet achingly familiar. His mother? Then there was something else…the smell of salt and the rocking of waves.