Ebn picked up a spell, rolled it between her palms. “I have been producing these with no clear intention in mind. Talking with Pol this morning gave me an idea, however. I think we can use them to show our goodwill to Adrash.”
“Are you sure this is wise?”
Spent, Ebn smiled without feeling. “No. I am not sure it is wise. But if you will sit with me I will try to explain. Maybe we can work the kinks out together.”
POL TANZ ET SOM
THE 16th OF THE MONTH OF SOLDIERS, 12499 MD
THE CITY OF TANSOT, KINGDOM OF STOL
The taste of lemon lingered, cloying in his mouth. He prepared a heavily spiced lunch on his own and ate it over a collection of stamped forms, struggling not to let anger overtake him. Fourteen separate requisitions for alchemicals, denied in the last month. Clipped to the final form was a note from the department bursar: Pol Tanz et Som, M.O.: Due to the ever-rising prices of the elder corpse market,
we must reject the additional alchemicals you have herein requested. Perhaps in the future, your research will warrant an expenditure of this magnitude. You are invited, as always, to make use of recycled materials in the faculty labs.
Recycled materials! Drained, lusterless ampoules of spent magic, barely suitable for the most basic of spells! Apparently, the administration expected him to do advanced research with fingernail clippings and candle wax. Maybe they thought prayer alone could sustain him.
Pol wondered if he could bring himself to ask a senior mage for assistance.
No. He possessed little stomach for begging favors from his peers, and such eldermen were likely to report his more esoteric undertakings to Ebn. At times, he felt as if she had persuaded the entire corps to watch him. Even the most conservative of his recent proposals had been met with suspicion. Some of the junior mages expressed interest in his theories, of course, but the junior mages were powerless and thus easily manipulated. They would spy on him to advance their careers.
You are too young to be so ambitious. Wait your turn.
He brushed the forms into the trash with the gnawed ostrich anklebones. He absently popped a gingersalt candy in his mouth and considered the problem. By its very nature, the academy did not cater to new thinking, and in the ranks of outbound mages the effect was even worse. He would need to take an unconventional tack if he had any chance of acquiring what he needed to resume his research and weaken Ebn’s position.
A more diplomatic approach, she had said. Ridiculous.
He left the apartment, not yet sure where he was going. The hallways were nearly empty. A quick spell, no more than a brief automatic query, gave him the time: thirty-three minutes past two. That explained it. Lunch and catnaps in the slanting sun. Eldermen were adept at many things, but afternoons were not one of them.
Pol himself felt the pull of a full stomach and sunbath, but the energy of youth sustained him. At twenty-three, his constitution was at its most agreeable. As a boy, it had seemed forever would come and go before his body would respond to his wishes. Then again, without the age-nullifying treatments that came with high rank in the academy, in ten years he would be an old man.
His thoughts, ever in movement, veered from one possibility to the next. Did he know anyone in requisitions? No. Archaeology? Geology? No. No one in the churches would help him, he felt sure—and their security was tighter than all other departments combined, their oaths the most binding. One could never underestimate their magics, either.
If Pol needed further proof of his desperation, the fact that he considered thievery sufficed.
Suddenly, a possibility presented itself to him. He did know someone in the medicines department, a young man whom he had bedded for a brief time several years previously. A human, beautiful in a thick way, not all that precocious but eager to please. A dark-haired Castan. He worked in the morgue. They had rutted on an examination table, once.
Jorrin? No. Jarres. That was the name. He had confessed to Pol that some of his mates filtered alchemical juices from the human and elderman corpses in their custody. They had made quite a bit of money this way.
Pol left the Esoteric Arts building and angled toward the White Ministry Hospital.
‡
The Avenue of Saints honored those who had died defending the name and nature of Adrash. Statues of men and women, eldermen and human, lined the avenue as it wound through the academy grounds. It was the end of summer, and the vala trees had bloomed copper and purple. Arching over the roadway, they created a perpetual twilight in which the saints took on a sinister bearing.
Evertin The Belligerent appeared ready to jump from his marble base and start hacking away with his greatsword, which scholars claimed he had called Harrowing. Domas Alastetl rested wearily on her throne, a great wound in her side, face so cunningly carved it seemed to move as one passed. And Oilo The Ghost hovered above his plinth of skulls and weapons, a fluid, ferocious form barely recognizable as human.
At the intersection of the Avenue of Saints and Villus Street, the exact center of the academy grounds, stood a statue of Adrash. Pol made a point to visit it every day, for it represented the god during wartime, in his most awful aspect—this, and it reminded Pol of home, where the iconography displayed a harsher edge than in the capitol.
Carved from a block of unveined black granite, the sublimely proportioned god stood prepared to meet an enemy. At first glance his posture seemed to convey an odd calm, but close examination revealed the tension in his neck and shoulders, the flexion of his forearms. His feet rested upon a base designed to look like a sphere of the Needle. Its rims disappeared into the ground and roadway.
The sculptor had dripped molten red gold onto Adrash’s heavily muscled torso and arms: the blood of men and beasts. The god’s left arm and portions of his chest and back had been carved from white marble, and the join between black and white was a sinuous line, showing that the divine armor had begun to sheath his body. Yellow gold covered his eyes. But for the armored section he was naked. The sculptor had endowed him with assets befitting a god.
Pol’s eyes lingered on this detail for a few seconds. Pressing his left fist to his forehead, he bowed deeply before moving on.
He had not always believed in Adrash’s benevolence. What he mirrored as a child could hardly be called faith, and what he rejected as a youth could not be called informed. He had felt as if his mother were forcing him to believe. For many years he had transferred his frustration onto Adrash, who became in his mind a bully of monumental proportions.
When he left his mother’s conservative Adrashism for the academy, he carried some of these sentiments with him. A sixteen-year-old boy, elderman or human, could not be expected to recognize his own arrogance for what it was—especially when that boy had recently arrived from Pusta, the Kingdom of Stol’s exclave on the coast of Knos Min, a virtual world away from the capitol. The boy’s blind arrogance could be a shield against the prejudice of his peers, who thought him a backwater fool.
Quickly adapting to their fighting style, Pol learned showing mercy came back to bite more often than not. So he stopped showing mercy. By the age of eighteen, he had killed seven men in self-defense and fought eleven duels. He became known for his temper and skill, as well as his genius in the magics.
He did not defend the reactionary beliefs of his youth or the people of Pusta, both of which he had long since come to view with amused disdain. Instead, he railed against the rote pronouncements of his teachers and peers, the mindless repetition of dogma. His own faith became a thing of fire and muscle. Adrash would not look kindly upon a weak people, sitting in contemplation, asking for his favor. The god, Pol came to believe, responded to strength. He did not want followers, but leaders.