Chapter 3: One Brick At A Time

The following morning brought a great deal of confusion. I had decided, though it terrified me, to act as if all were normal, presenting myself to the Dolomites for assignment as if the last night had been no different than any other. To my mix of relief and surprise, my masters did the same. I was asked to assist Griseo Adept with the process I had childishly dubbed stimulightning, where a volunteer had portions of both their heart and brain exposed and tests were done with electricity. I managed the restraints while Martus, another Boy of the Batch, applied varied arcs to the naked tissue. Griseo Adept instructed me according to the adjustments of the restraints; whether to allow for more movement or less, and cataloged the volunteer's responses into a codex. It was as ordinary a morning as I'd ever known.

  Martus and I worked together most of the day, carting various masses to the purging chamber. He too had been initiated to the examination feasting, and like me kept his disgust hidden and tongue silent. We were quite busy carving the meat and disposing of the Dolomites' vomit, when it dawned on me that we were down to only a few volunteers; four, to be exact, though there should have been five. Where the fifth had gone greatly concerned me, but I was much more worried over the acquiring of more. It was never an easy process. Still, it was preferable to the masters gathering them on their own. Better for us Boys of the Batch to do a tour of the oubliette than for townsfolk to start disappearing.

  As the adepts seemed unaware of their shortage of subjects, I suggested to Martus that he and I venture to the oubliette and take stock. He nodded. We never spoke much. We performed our duties together, silently aware that we'd seen a hidden aspect of the adepts that we both feared to share. I think that had one or both of us been ignorant to the carnal nature of the examination process, we likely would have spoken as boys do. But I was unsure what else Martus was aware of, and I imagine he had similar questions towards me. Our comradery thus hindered, we spoke as little as needed, sometimes less.

  The oubliette was always kept dim. It was brighter still than naked daylight, except perhaps than noontide on an orange cloud day. On such a day you would find me on the highest point I could reach, even braving the tops of the spear tipped monuments that burst from the ground outside our protected borders. The orange blot in the sky called to me in an animal way, teasing that part of me that rejected what I would one day be taught about the Sun. In all of us there is a transcendent womb where we are still unborn and embellicaly linked to chaos. Not the destructive sort of chaos, but the orphic sort; primordial cosmic chaos. I've come to the conclusion that true intelligence has nothing to do with knowledge of rhetoric or poetry or history or science or ontology or geography or mathematics or inculcated traditions of any sort, but is measured entirely by the free flow of feeling from that primal nexus to one's own gut. What we do with that linkage is a matter of choice and vulnerable to circumstance, but without that free flow from the all to the one, the mind is as dark as the wastes of the sky.

  Martus followed me uncertainly down the spiraling ramp to the holding cells. He was entirely unsure what to do with himself, as he showed every time we came to a turn or a stair or a door. Always he would seem about to act before me, then withdraw, eyes agape and searching mine for a que. He almost tripped over me when we came to the spiraling ramp, and when we reached the red aura that warded the cells he was in such an anxious rush that I worried he might walk into the field.

  I remembered the time one of us touched the ward. The Dolomite assigned to our training had warned us with harsh clicks and squawks never to do so. I had worked with that boy days later, tasked with draining the souls of the prisoners so the adepts might study their rebellious nature. I would never speak of it, but I learned they were doing so to harness the violence in a criminal's soul, not becalm it. The boy, Depard was his name, I think, left his duty card in a cell, having lost it when that prisoner proved tougher than his restraints. The man freed one arm, and swinging it wildly he freed Depard's duty card from its lanyard. He feared disappointing our masters, as we all did, so he turned back to retrieve it. I am pained to admit this, but I had a hand in his death. I argued with him to leave it, and if I had paid closer attention to our instructors I would have remembered that our duty cards were imbued with a blessing of passing. But my mind had drifted while the adept explained the purpose of the constraining field, so instead of going back with Depard I marched stubbornly onward, only stopping when I heard him scream. When I got him there was only a small pile of ashes on the ground.

  I lifted my arm to stop Martus from going too far forward. He was a much bigger boy than me, and I almost lost my arm to the ward. I was small and weak for my age, a flaw I would one day rectify, though I have remained sword all my days. Martus held up his duty card and the ward faded away. We entered cautiously, squinting as our eyes adapted to the strange lighting down there. Even when the wards were down, a red glow lingered.

  The first few cells were empty, which worried us both. One at least of those cells should have been populated, and with two prisoners or more. When we found all the cells empty, we exchanged confused looks before hurrying to the only place where the prisoners could be. As I said before, the Dolomites sought to harness criminal rage, not suppress it. I suspected that they wished to engineer a fighting force enslaved to their will, maybe to replace the expensive tarrasquin sellswords. To keep these men fighting fit, there was a large, heavilly warded chamber set aside for scheduled and monitored exercise.

  We made our way to the antechamber and summoned the djinn shackled there. I asked to see the exercise hall, and the djinn folded his arms, summoning a curtain of blue light. The exercise hall appeared before us as if the wall between had vanished. What we saw terrified us. Three of the Dolomites were in the room with their most invasive instruments and wands operating on one of the inmates. The others were beating their knuckles bloody against the metal door.

  We were too dumbstruck to notice when Albedo Adept entered the room. He roared at us first, a sound I'd never heard him or any of them make. Then from his leathery beak came the sound I'd heard before from the examination room; the sound of a beast retching out the screaming words of a man. My body was completely frozen, save for my dripping bladder. The stink of my cowardice filled my nose, mingling with the smell of blood and gizzard. He stepped close to us slowly, then lurched forward towards me, sniffing the air. He barked and squawked angrily, then turned suddenly to Martus, who looked for me wild eyed. I wanted to reach out and grip the sleeve of his robe, to sooth the look of abandonment on his face, but I was paralyzed, and watched with tears as Albedo Adept wrapped his long, clawed metal fingers around Martus's throat and torso.

  The sound was so faint I almost didn't hear it, but there was a quiet hum, and shortly after the room pulsed with a soft light that danced between yellow and pink. Albedo Adept dropped Martus to the ground and turned to the door, then walked out as if entranced. I helped Martus to his feet, noticing with my nose that he too had wet himself. He looked at me angrily and opened his mouth as if to shout, but we were disturbed by the opening of the exercise hall doors and the shrieking of the inmates. They ran to their cells and cowered under their bunks as the adepts all filed out of the oubliette. We went about locking the cells, and I was almost as entranced as the adepts by the pink and yellow light. I walked with Martus to the porter house and saw him to bed, then changed my small clothes and found Brother Astartes, one of the older porters. I informed him there were no more usable volunteers in custody, and that there would need to be an inquest. He nodded gravely, then summoned his fellow elders and went to the guardhouse where the sanctified porters kept their weapons.

  I did not sleep that night, partly due to the fearful shouts coming from Ossary, and of course because of the terror I still felt after the oubliette. I found Kendra, and watched her spinning atop a boulder while she sang a song about a silver moon that was a mother to wolves. I thought back to the days before my branding, and how I would close my young eyes in times of stress, then imagine my toes digging deep into the ground and finding their way into the hidden Sun at the heart of the world, casting aside the Devils that haunted the deep and making their kingdom a place of eternal, blissful dreams. Since the day of my branding, those happy thoughts caused pain. I wanted to tell this to Kendra, but she looked happy, so I kept quiet. I remember acutely that I felt very, very wrong, like I was no longer me, and tried to force those old fancies through the reflexive hurt my branding seemed to have raised like a wall. The feeling of wrongness intensified, and I began to see myself in triplicate, only robed and with long, flowing hair and my faces shrouded in silver cloth. My shadows raised their arms to point, and I felt the same terror as in the oubliette. Kendra's singing stopped, so I looked to see what was wrong. She starred at me blankly for a moment, then began searching, tip-toeing around in a full circle. Her silliness calmed me, even made me laugh, and when she faced me again she acted surprised before resuming her song and play.

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