"Sir, this scum was drunk on duty last night," the guard-chief would say.
"Which one is it?" he would bark in reply, straightening his back, a man of action and decisiveness. Anjeyla would sigh with admiration.
"Tyron, sir," the chief would reply. "I regret I ever recommended him to you." And as Anjeyla gasped in recognition, the chief would grab Tyron by the hair, and pull his head up, so that there could be no mistake about who it was.
Anjeyla would make a little pout of disdain, and pointedly move away from Tyron and toward Lan, perhaps even placing her hand on his bicep. Tyron would see, and he would look sick and dismayed.
Lan would wait long enough for all the implications to sink in, then bark, "And what do you have to say for yourself, scum?"
"So this is where you've been hiding," Tyron replied.
For a moment, Lan stared at the door in confusion; that wasn't what Tyron was supposed to say! Then, with a snap, he came back to himself, and his hands clutched the sides of his desk involuntarily.
Tyron leaned against the doorframe, surrounded by the rest of his gang, an indolent smile on his face. "I wondered how you were managing to get past us every day, you little sneak," the Sixth Former sneered. "You never got past us at all. You've been hiding up here all along."
"You—you aren't allowed to be here!" was all Lan could manage, in a faint accusation, his voice breaking on the last word.
"In school hours," Tyron corrected. "After school hours, and before, we can go anywhere in the building we choose."
Full of dismay, his heart pounding and sweat breaking out on his forehead, Lan sought desperately for something that might make Tyron and his band of bullies go away. "I'm studying," he said, ducking his head submissively. "It's too hard to study at home, there's too much noise."
The printed page wavered and blurred before his eyes. "Oooh, poor little Scrub!" Tyron mocked. "You know, somehow I don't believe you. I don't think you have any trouble studying at home at all. After all, you managed very, very well while you were playing sick, didn't you?"
Lan glanced up, feeling sick. Tyron unfolded his arms, straightened, and moved away from the doorway, followed by the rest of the bullies. "I don't believe that you were studying just now at all. I must have stood there for a quarter candle-mark, and you didn't once turn a page."
Lan tried not to cringe, as Tyron stopped right next to him, towering over him. "You, little Scrub, are making things v-e-r-y difficult for me. You're eroding my discipline, and setting a bad example for the others. Why should they obey, when they know all they have to do is stay in their classrooms and they can avoid their just punishments?"
Lan averted his eyes and stared at his book, hands clenched around the sides of the desk, his knuckles turning white.
Tyron was just starting. "And, I believe, you have a just punishment coming to you. Doesn't he, Derwit?"
"Setting a bad example, ten strokes," said a cold voice from Lan's other side. "Eroding discipline, ten strokes. That's twenty."
Twenty strokes! Lan's head reeled and a wave of dizziness overcame him. Not even his father had ever flogged Lan with more than five strokes of a cane!
"Oh, but that's not all, not by any means," Tyron purred. "Unless, of course, you happen to have that velvet I told you to bring me squirreled away in your book bag—"
Lan's head shot up, and he stared at Tyron in shock, all conscious thought driven out of his mind. I thought he'd forgotten about that by now!
Tyron smiled tenderly, but his eyes were as cold as a fish's. "I thought not. So what would that be, Derwit?"
"Twenty strokes for refusing to obey, ten strokes for lying about being sick, ten for lying about not being able to study at home, and ten for avoiding punishment by lurking up here," Derwit replied with gloating satisfaction. "That's seventy strokes in all."
Something hot and angry began to stir sluggishly down in the farthest depths of Lan's mind, but he still couldn't think, or even move. At the moment, it was panic that had control of his body; the same panic a trapped rabbit feels when it freezes. Two of the bullies pried his hands away from the desk and hauled him to his feet by his elbows.
"I don't think we ought to deal them out to him all at once," Loman said thoughtfully. "We're not allowed to break the skin, you know. No wounds. Master Keileth was very forceful on that point."
"Oh, really, Loman, when have you ever known me to be so clumsy as to break the skin?" Tyron chided, leading the way as Lan was hauled bodily out of the classroom and down the stairs. "Still, you have a point. We can't lame him so that his parents would take exception. Perhaps we can spread the punishment out over a few days. Say, four. We can bring the total up to eighty strokes just to keep things even; add another ten for encouraging the others to avoid us by hiding in the classrooms."
Lan dug in his heels and tried to resist, but the others were so much stronger and taller, they just hauled him right off his feet altogether. In a nightmarishly short time, they had him down all four flights of stairs, and into an unused classroom on the back of the building, far from the street. No matter how much he screamed and yelled, no one would hear him here.
"You can fuss all you want, but no one is going to hear you," Tyron pointed out helpfully, confirming his thought. "I do encourage you to do so, however; it lets me know that I'm doing a good job."
Lan gagged, as his stomach surged with nausea. There was a single, straight-backed chair in the middle of the room, and four leather straps on the seat of the chair. It was pretty obvious what they were going to do with that chair.
"Want us to strap him down, Tyron?" asked one of the two monsters holding his arms.
Tyron was playing with a willow cane, experimentally bending it and swishing it through the air. "Not yet. Why don't you just play with him for a little until I'm ready."
Lan didn't get much chance to wonder what that meant. The monsters dropped him; he stumbled, not quite falling, and before he could get his balance, the first one shoved him, hard.
He hit the wall with bruising force, knocking some of the breath out of his body, and another of the bullies grabbed his arm, wrenched him away from the wall, and shoved him at a third.
They passed him from one to the other, alternately catching him and knocking him into the walls. And as they did so, that sullen little spark of heat began to grow, driving everything before it, and filling him with a white-hot rage that burned away his thoughts and contended with the panic and fear for supremacy.
*
RAIN sheeted down, drenching everything in sight—which wasn't much, as the rain curtains obscured most objects farther away than ten horse-lengths. Pol pulled his hood a little closer around his face, and kept his eyes fixed on Satiran's neck.