“The principal problem with being stabbed repeatedly is not the blood loss as most people would suppose. Oh, certainly if you’re burdened with a pesky limitation like ‘needing blood to survive’, the blood loss is significant. Once you’ve eliminated that particular eccentricity though, the primary issue of enduring repeated bodily trauma is that it tends to remove the aches and pains which have become familiar companions over the years and replace them with new ones.
Where the old injuries were content to merely whimper and growl when they could catch you at unawares, the new ones are just so happy to be part of you that they’re constantly clamoring for your attention. This, I believe, is why the gods invented strong drink.”
– Xindir Harshek Doxel of the First Flame
Starting the first day of Cadet Training off with a test seemed both stupid and cruel. Thanks to Doxle though I knew it was only meant to be cruel and the stupidity came from the Academy’s self-interest running rampant and trampling its initial reasons to exist into the dust.
“Think we’ll get to fight each other?” Narla asked as we changed into our official Cadet training armor.
With Mellina, we were the last three in to girls locker room, having arrived “late” (though perfectly within the posted time) thanks to Pastries’ fantastic breakfast spread. Supposedly we would have to run ten extra laps for our tardiness but breakfast had been good enough that I regretted nothing.
“Probably not,” I said. “It would be crueler for them to make you fight whoever scored lowest and me to fight the one above that.”
“What? That’s not even going to be a fight though,” Narla said. The regulation armor didn’t come close to fitting her, which wasn’t terribly surprising. What was interesting to see was that she’d apparently developed magic to deal with that problem.
Crushing the chainmail shirt in between her hands, she whispered something in a language no one else on this world spoke. “Be Bigger!” was what I heard by rippling my ears to match hers and then back to my own. When she unclenched her hands, the chainmail had indeed obeyed her order (and the magic she’d sent surging through it) with the chain shirt enlarged and morphed to fit around her shoulders, chest, and waist perfectly.
“Was that an intelligent spell?” I asked, more curious than was probably polite to be.
“Oh, yeah,” Narla said. “It’s a nice one though, I learned it when I was really little.”
Intelligent spells weren’t creatures in their own right, but they were generally tied to intelligent beings from the plane the spell’s magic was drawn from. From what I’d heard, they tended to be fiercely dangerous to work with because the denizen whose aid was requested by the spell could twist the request back on the caster, sometimes dragging the caster into their realm, sometimes dragging themselves into the caster.
“They won’t start us with fights,” Mellina said. “We’re expecting that. They’ll start us with exams, written and verbal.”
“On what?” I asked, deciding that was probably an even crueler option that the one I’d proposed.
“A wide variety of subjects about which they expect us to know very little,” she said. “The goal is to convince us that we’re ignorant of all the important things a Cadet needs to know and that we therefor need to look to them to enlighten our poor, feeble minds.”
“And if we decide we don’t care about the tests and are fine not knowing the useless trivia they think constitutes valuable information?” I asked.
“Low scoring people will be given unpleasant tasks. High scoring people will be given perks which makes the rest of the Cadets jealous and resentful of them.”
“So which do we do? Neither one of those sounds good,” Narla said.
“We can choose to fail,” Mellina said. “Passing is at the whim of the instructor who’s grading the exams. We won’t get to see our scored test sheets for the written exams, or learn which answers we were given credit for and which were deemed incorrect. For the verbal exams, they won’t be that kind.”
“I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that if we were willing to bribe the instructors properly, we could improve our grades substantially?” I asked, more or less already aware of what the answer would be.
“Do we have gold to spend on grades now?” Mellina asked brightly but without a hint of sincerity in her voice. I’d told my housemates about going to see the escrow holder for House Riverbond with Doxle later and that we were essentially broke until I convinced them to open the purse strings for us.
“Why would you pay to be hated by everyone?” Narla asked. “It’s so easy to get that for free.”
An hour later I had a decent understanding of why one might use gold to escape the testing phase of our training.
Where the first part of the test had been a half hour sprint through a hundred pages of explanatory text and the questions which were scattered randomly within it, the next five hours were a face-to-face interview where students were called forth to sit in front of all of the rest of the Cadets and face a panel of judges.
Cadets were called in a random order, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs or trios. Each set were asked questions which, according to the judges, were part of the reading materials we’d been given.
The Cadets who’d breezed through the Trials breezed mostly breezed through the interview questions too, though it looked like that was more a case that they’d been given the questions they would be asked before hand rather than the judges pitching them obviously easy ones.
The first time I was called up, it was alone, and I was given twice the number of questions as the group before me. All of them were phrased in as convoluted a manner as possible and covered obscure and exacting points of Imperial doctrine regarding the privileges and responsibilities of ill defined ranks in the hierarchy of the Great Houses.
“I have no idea,” was my answer to all of the question, except for one on the size of the annual allowance for footwear due a landless second daughter from her elder sister who had married into a non-ranked household of another Great House. Grammy had mentioned a story about that once and so I was both surprised and certain that I knew the answer.
And they told me I was wrong.
I wanted to fight them over the point since looking like an idiot in front of a full class of cadets wasn’t exactly fun, but I held my tongue. I could murder every one of the judges and still not win that fight.
My housemates didn’t fare much better than I did, though Mellina answered two of her first three questions well enough to get “partial credit” and Yarrin answered his with perfect accuracy only to be shot down on each one as the judges changed the definition of the question out from under him.
The only other cadet whose answers I paid attention to was Idrina. She was given six questions. She answered four of them correctly, and the last two were “partials” only because the judges cut her off before she could finish giving the correct answer.
I was sitting three rows back and I could feel the rage radiating off her from that distance but, like I had, she didn’t bother fighting it.
This wasn’t a test. It was public humiliation. We could argue for fairness, but the Academy had no interest in fairness and none to give out. They wanted us angry and defeated, and after a few minutes I saw that the right answer was to give them neither.
That belief was put to the test when the “grades” were given out and I was at the bottom of the list.
“Those who have shown more brawn than intellect,” the head judge said, “will be assigned child’s implements for this afternoon’s sparring and bestial combat sessions. Those who have proven their mastery of the basic information all Cadets were assumed to be in possession of as a prerequisite to application will be granted the use of their choice of armaments, with the most gifted being allowed to select a prestige weapon from those supplied by the courtesy and grace of House Lightstone.”
Most of the Cadets seemed to be caught up by the idea of ‘prestige weapons’ but the bit that drew my attention was the judge’s mention of ‘bestial combat sessions’.
Sparring I’d been expecting. Combat against more Reaving Beasts though? I was neither prepared for nor willing to partake in that.
That was true in spite of Yarrin making a good case earlier for why we needed to join the Field Work program, which would absolutely involve working with, and likely fighting, Reaving Beasts in the wild.
“We’ll be expected to arm and outfit ourselves for battle on Field Work assignments,” he said. “The people who want us dead will still attack us, but that will happen no matter where we are. If we’re stuck with mucking out the latrines, we’ll be at too great a disadvantage when those who wish to see us dead make their move.”
“But if we’re in a Reaving Storm, or fighting a Reaving Beast, won’t they be able to catch us while we’re distracted?” Ilyan asked. “There’s a lot that can go wrong on those hunts, even without people creating accidents on purpose.”
“I’ll be able to see any traps they leave for us,” Yarrin said. “If we throw our attackers into their own traps once or twice, they’ll stop trying to use them, and we won’t have a better opportunity to do that and get away with it than with a Reaving Storm to cover our tracks.”
Going out on a Field Work assignment wasn’t a great option, but compared to the others it seemed like the right call. The biggest downside was that it would bring us into conflict with the Reaving Beasts that came forth from the storm.
I’d talked one such creature into returning to its home, and I had every intention of repeating that for every Reaving Beast I came across if I could. As Yarrin had said, a Reaving Storm could cover up a lot of activity.
If they were making us fight Reaving Beasts on the grounds though, there wouldn’t be any Reaving Storm to hide within. It would be me and another beast with no options aside from killing each other or being killed together by the staff of the Academy.
“If we have time before the sparring starts, would you be able to help me get somewhere?” I whispered to Mellina.
“Where?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet,” I said, knowing that to call the idea I had a ‘plan’ was laughably over valuing it.
“There are many places it’s not wise for us to go,” she said.
I paused at those words.
She was not wrong.
I had been though.
Asking her to help me did nothing but put her in danger for a cause that I didn’t want to explain to her and that she would likely not be in favor of. I could be selfish, and I could be cruel, but I owed Mellina better than that.
“You’re right,” I said. “I can’t go charging off after stupid ideas all the time.”
I was being honest there. She was right, and I knew my idea was stupid. I was still going to charge off to do it, but doing so without bringing anyone else into danger was at least bordering on an intelligent option I felt.
We were ordered to the mess hall for a midday meal, something I’d heard the common tier Cadets weren’t being given, and instructed that once the meal was complete, we would begin our sparring matches.
That gave me something like an hour to work with, and so as the testing hall emptied out, I lingered behind, hoping to be able to make a clean break and attend to the Reaving Beasts before anyone could work out that I was missing.
My plan, such as it was, involved claiming I’d needed to check with Doxle on something and that Advisor privileges came before the dictates of the Academy. That probably wasn’t true, but it sounded good enough that at least the other Cadets might buy it.
I’d separated myself from the throng of Cadets and allowed my housemates to go on ahead without me before making a decidedly wrong turn down one of the hallways towards where I thought I’d seen a stable setup. I didn’t expect them to be mixing the Reaving Beasts with horses or other animals, but since I hadn’t seen inside the stable yet I pegged it as a good place to begin searching for a group of otherworldly creatures who were being goaded into acting as killing machines.
I felt rather proud of myself for the stealth I’d displayed in slipping away unnoticed.
That feeling last roughly thirty seconds before I turned a corner and nearly plowed into Narla and the rest of my housemates.
“Told you she’d be here,” Yarrin said, accepting a gold piece from Ilyan.