Chapter 66

Chapter 66: Chapter 66

Professor Sterling’s midterm exam had forty questions, and number thirty-eight was about the salt tariff on the Three Rivers.

When we walked out of the lecture hall at noon on Friday, I didn’t say a word. I just reached into my pocket, pulled out two copper pennies, and dropped them into Nia’s palm as we walked down the marble stairs.

Nia grinned, pocketing the coins. "Told you Sterling wouldn’t accept tax fraud. How did you do on the family tree for the Westmarch mines?"

"I got it," I said, flexing my right fingers to work out the cramp from holding the steel pen for two hours. "And I wrote down the barrel weights for the salt addendum. If Aurio is still in the dining hall at dinner, I owe him a pear tart."

"I answered ’the younger brother’ for three different questions in a row," Luckas complained, walking backward down the steps ahead of us with his hands shoved into his trouser pockets. "If at least one of those uncles didn’t inherit a castle, I’m going to have to challenge someone in the top twenty tomorrow just to make up my points."

"You shouldn’t have fallen asleep on the couch at nine o’clock," Kaelen said, stepping neatly around a pair of second-year girls carrying stacks of parchment.

"I was resting my eyes while you read about turnip blight, Kaelen. There’s a difference."

We didn’t have time to stop at the main pavilion for a hot lunch. On Friday afternoons, the practical survival track met down in the Kennels—a long, low-slung stone building tucked into the cliffside below the northern wall, downwind from the rest of the campus so the smell wouldn’t drift into the faculty gardens.

Nia bought four warm meat pies wrapped in greased brown paper from a cart near the stables, and we ate them while walking down the wet gravel switchbacks toward the cliff edge. By the time we reached the iron gates of the Kennels, the smell of roasted pork from our pies was completely drowned out by the thick, sour stench of ammonia, wet straw, and rotted fish guts.

Half the first-year class was already huddled outside the entrance, holding wool handkerchiefs over their noses.

Inside, the Kennels looked more like a prison block than a barn. A wide central hallway with a drainage trench cut down the middle ran between two rows of sunken stone pits covered by heavy iron grates. As we filed in and stood along the brass guardrails, shapes shifted in the dark below us—the heavy, wet slap of a six-foot lizard tail hitting stone, the dry clicking of insect mandibles, and the low, whistling hiss of something with too many lungs.

At the far end of the hall, where the floor opened into a wide circular butcher’s pit covered in fresh sawdust, Master Toris stood beside a tall, stooped man wearing a butcher’s apron of thick waxed canvas over his scholar’s robes.

"Put the handkerchiefs away!" Toris barked, his voice bouncing off the low stone arches. "If you faint because a cage smells like dung, I’m failing you for the term and throwing you in the pit to wake up! Hands at your sides!"

Thirty linen squares vanished into pockets instantly.

"This is Doctor Aldous Fenn from the Royal Menagerie," Toris said, gesturing to the man in the waxed apron. "For the next two hours, he is going to show you what actually lives on the other side of the border walls. Pay attention, because next spring, some of you will be assigned to frontier outposts where these things eat the horses."

Doctor Fenn didn’t have Toris’s booming parade-ground voice. He spoke in a dry, pleasant rattle, wiping a pair of long steel forceps on a towel as he walked to the edge of the circular pit.

"Most first-year cadets are taught to aim for the center of the chest or the throat," Fenn said, adjusting his spectacles with a knuckle. "That works splendidly if you are fighting a rebel tax collector in a wool shirt. It works considerably less well when your target doesn’t keep its heart in its ribcage."

He pulled an iron lever set into the wall.

With a loud, rusty squeal of chains, a sliding gate at the back of the sawdust pit rose two feet. Two kennel hands on the walkway above used long iron poles to prod something low and heavy out of the dark holding pen into the lantern light.

Several cadets in the front row took a hasty step back against the benches.

It was a juvenile shale-crab from the southern sinkholes—though nobody in the 7th Legion called them crabs. We called them anvil-backs. It was roughly the size of a butcher’s table, low to the ground on eight thick, jointed legs covered in overlapping plates of grey horn that looked exactly like wet river slate. It didn’t have a head—just a wide, semicircular front shell with two recessed black eyes and a pair of crushing front pincers thick enough to snap a man’s shinbone like a dry carrot.

It hissed, blowing bubbles of milky yellow froth from the breathing slits beneath its shell, and backed into the curve of the pit wall, raising its claws.

"Ugly little bastard, isn’t he?" Doctor Fenn said fondly. "We had three of these shipped up from the border fort at Shepfold in barrels of wet mud last week. Now—who can tell me what happens if Lord Vance here hits that top shell with a standard fireball?"

Luckas frowned, looking down at the grey carapace. "It cooks inside the shell?"

"It does not," Fenn said cheerfully. "The outer carapace is two inches of dead calcified horn layered over four inches of dense, wet fat. Your fire rolls right off the curve, singes the moss on its back, and makes it angry enough to take your leg off at the knee. What if you hit it with a steel longsword?"

"The edge glances off," I said from the second row.

Fenn pointed his steel forceps at me. "Correct. Unless you are carrying a forty-pound maul or a high-grade runic blade, swinging at the top shell just ruins your wrist. However, like everything that crawls out of the mud, it has to breathe, and it has to bend its legs."

He picked up a ten-foot wooden pole with a blunt iron hook on the end and reached down into the pit. When the anvil-back lunged forward and snapped its left claw shut on the wood—crushing the two-inch ash shaft into splinters with a loud crunch—Fenn didn’t pull back. He used his other hand to slide a thin iron rod under the beast’s body, right behind the second pair of legs, and levered upward.

Because the shell was so wide and heavy on top, the moment its left legs lifted three inches off the sawdust, its center of gravity failed. The beast flipped onto its back with a heavy, hollow thud.

Its eight legs pedaled furiously at the empty air, revealing a soft, pale grey underbelly segmented like a wasp’s abdomen. Right in the center, where the legs met the chest plate, a dark blue vein the thickness of a man’s thumb pulsed visibly beneath thin, translucent skin.

"The ventral nerve cluster," Fenn said, tapping the air above the blue line with his broken pole. "Three inches deep. No bone, no horn. You flip it with a spear shaft or a shield rim, and you put eight inches of cold iron right through that blue line. The legs lock up instantly, and you don’t even ruin the shell if you want to boil it down for glue."

He stepped back from the rim and clapped his hands. "Six cadets to a pit. Each group has a smaller thirty-pound specimen waiting in the side pens. You will go down into the sawdust with two wooden lever-poles and one short-knife. Within ten minutes, I want the beast pinned on its back and the yellow scent gland behind the back left leg lanced and drained into a glass vial without killing the specimen. If you break its shell or burn it with Ember, your entire group loses ten rank points. Off you go."

Our quartet got paired with two other first-years: a quiet merchant’s daughter named Clara Beck, and a tall, sharp-nosed noble boy from the western provinces named Cedric Dunmore.

Cedric spent the entire walk down the iron steps into Pit Three complaining about his boots.

"This sawdust hasn’t been changed since Tuesday," Cedric muttered, looking down with disgust as his polished riding boots sank an inch into the damp shavings. He wore a small bronze ring on his thumb that marked him as a third cousin to one of the earls on the grain council. "Why are they having Knight-Mage candidates do butcher’s work? We have camp followers for this."

"Camp followers don’t follow you into a sinkhole, Dunmore," I said, picking up one of the six-foot ash poles from the rack against the pit wall and checking the wood for cracks. "Take the second pole. You and Luckas are on the left side. When the gate goes up, wait until it snaps at my pole, then slide your tip under the second leg joint and lift together on my count."

Cedric stared at me, his hand resting on the hilt of his practice dagger. "I am not taking orders from a border conscript on how to poke a crab with a stick. It weighs thirty pounds. I’ll just pin it down with kinetic pressure and cut the sac myself."

"Doctor Fenn said no heavy Ember," Nia reminded him, holding the small glass vial and the brass lancet. "If you crush its ribs, we all lose ten points."

"I have better control than that, Valerius," Cedric scoffed.

Before I could take the pole out of his hands, the kennel hand above us cranked the iron wheel.

The gate rattled upward.

Our specimen didn’t wait to be prodded out with a stick. Whoever had packed it into the barrel at Shepfold hadn’t fed it all week, and the smell of forty sweaty cadets in a warm room had driven it frantic. It shot out of the dark chute like a flat grey boulder rolling downhill, its mandibles clicking violently, heading straight for the closest pair of legs—which belonged to Clara Beck.

Clara let out a high, strangled squeak and froze with her back against the stone wall, dropping her wooden pole in the sawdust.

"Hold it!" Cedric shouted, stepping forward instead of using his pole. He shoved his right palm out and fired a burst of raw, unshaped orange heat straight at the creature’s face to scare it off.

It was the worst possible thing he could have done.

Anvil-backs are nearly blind in daylight; they hunt in the dark sinkholes by tracking the body heat of warm-blooded prey through sensory pits along their jaws. Cedric’s flare of heat didn’t scare it—it blinded its eyes and lit him up like a dinner bell.

The thirty-pound beast pivoted on its back legs with terrifying speed, ignoring Clara entirely, and scuttled straight up the shaft of Cedric’s boot.

Cedric yelled, stumbling backward in the loose sawdust as the creature’s right pincer clamped shut around the thick leather cuff of his riding boot, just above the ankle. The heavy horn claw didn’t quite shear through the doubled saddle leather, but the bone underneath gave a sharp, ugly pop.

Cedric hit the ground on his backside, screaming and kicking wildly with his free leg while his right hand flared with panicked, gathering fire aimed right at his own shin.

"Don’t burn it!" I barked. "If you cook it while the claw is locked, the tendon shrinks and it’ll take your foot off!"

I didn’t draw my dagger. I dropped my wooden pole, crossed the six feet of sawdust in two strides, and dropped my knees squarely onto the sawdust beside Cedric’s hip.

Kaelen was already there on the other side, pinning Cedric’s trembling right wrist to the dirt with his boot so the panicked boy couldn’t set himself on fire.

The anvil-back hissed at me, raising its free left claw toward my face, droplets of yellow froth flying from its jaws.

I didn’t try to grab the claw. In the caves north of Shepfold, we used to catch these things in buckets to boil their legs when the supply wagons were late. If you pull on the claw, it squeezes harder.

I scooped up a double handful of wet, cold sawdust from the floor and slapped it hard across the beast’s flat front shell, packing the damp shavings directly over the four heat-sensing pits along its upper jaw.

Instantly, the creature went blind. It froze for half a second, confused as the warm target in front of it vanished into cold wet wood.

"Luckas, the hook!" I snapped.

Luckas jammed the blunt iron end of his pole into the hinge joint behind the creature’s right pincer—not prying the claw open, just pressing hard against the round green cartilage bump where the muscle attached to the shell.

With a sharp spasm, the claw sprang open automatically.

Before it could snap shut again, I slipped both my leather-gauntleted hands under the cold, slimy rim of its side shell and heaved upward with my legs and back, flipping the thirty-pound beast clean off Cedric’s boot and slamming it upside down onto the sawdust.

I planted my right boot across the flat plate of its lower tail to keep it from curling up, while Luckas dropped his knee onto the blunt front edge of its shell. Its eight legs kicked uselessly at the air between us.

"Nia, the vial," I said, breathing evenly.

Nia didn’t hesitate. Even though her face was pale from the noise of Cedric’s ankle popping, she knelt down in the dirt between Kaelen and me, held the glass bottle under the pale yellow swelling behind the beast’s back left leg, and made a single, neat nick with the brass lancet. Half an ounce of thick, musky fluid drained into the glass, and she plugged it with a cork.

Up on the walkway, Doctor Fenn peered over the brass railing, looking down at Cedric howling in the sawdust and me standing with one boot on the pinned crab.

"Well," Doctor Fenn said dryly, checking his pocket watch. "One minute and forty seconds. A bit noisy, Group Three, and Cadet Dunmore will be spending his weekend in the infirmary with a hairline fracture in his fibula—plus a ten-point deduction to his personal ledger for discharging unauthorized fire in my kennels. The rest of you get full marks."

Two kennel hands came down the stairs with a wooden stretcher for Cedric, who had gone white around the nostrils and was biting his lip to keep from crying in front of the girls.

As we climbed back up the steps and washed the sour slime off our gauntlets at the outdoor water pump, Clara Beck looked at me while drying her hands on her apron.

"Thank you, Lieutenant," she said quietly, her voice still shaking a little. "I couldn’t make my feet move when it came out of the gate."

"They move faster than they look," I told her, pumping cold lake water over my leather sleeves. "Next time, don’t look at the claws. Watch the back legs. It can’t jump unless it tucks the back pair under its belly first."

Clara nodded earnestly, pulling a small pencil stub out of her pocket to write that down on the cuff of her linen shirt before hurrying off toward the main campus.

Luckas leaned against the stone basin of the pump, shaking water off his fingers. "Where did you learn that trick with the wet sawdust? That wasn’t in Toris’s manual."

"A corporal from the river villages showed me," I said, buckling my gauntlet strap back down. "We ate four of them during the autumn rains when the bridge washed out. If you boil the claw meat with enough garlic, it tastes like muddy river pike."

"Remind me never to let you plan the menu if we get stationed together," Luckas said, grinning as we started back up the switchback trail toward the upper citadel.

When we reached the top of the cliff path and came out onto the gravel square behind the Student Union, however, the normal Friday afternoon chatter was missing.

Usually, by four o’clock on a Friday, the square was full of students kicking leather balls around the grass or buying roasted chestnuts from the gate carts before the weekend pass hours started. Today, nearly two hundred cadets were crowded silently around the massive slate Registry Board bolted to the exterior wall of the administrative tower.

Above the board, the three brass lanterns that usually stayed unlit all month were burning with a steady, chemical green flame.

"The Purge docket," Nia said, her step slowing as she looked at the green lanterns. "The clerks just pinned the challenge list for tomorrow morning."

We walked over to the edge of the crowd. As soon as the first-years at the back saw the silver Rank Three and Rank Four clasps on my cloak and Luckas’s collar, they stepped aside without being asked, opening a narrow lane to the front of the slate wall.

The board was divided into two halves. On the right side was a long parchment scroll listing the thirty bottom-ranked cadets—Ranks 970 through 1000—who were scheduled for mandatory elimination bouts at dawn in the lower pits to decide who would be packed onto the noon ferry back to the mainland in disgrace.

On the left side, pinned under heavy brass clips, were three smaller slips of thick cream parchment stamped with red wax.

SANCTIONED TOP TEN CHALLENGES — SATURDAY, FIRST BELL Live Steel — Pit One

I read the middle slip.

Challenger: Cadet Titus Mercer (Year 4, Rank 11) Defender: Cadet Elvit (Year 1, Rank 3) Stakes: Rank Placement & Crown Mineral Stipend

Standing ten feet to the left of the board, surrounded by four other fourth-year boys in heavy wool coats, was Titus Mercer himself.

He looked exactly like Julian Falk had described him: six feet and four inches of broad, heavy bone, with a thick neck, a square jaw, and pale blonde hair cropped close to his skull. He didn’t have the sleek, duelist build of Gael or the polished look of Aurio Gentrimio; his knuckles were thick and scarred from heavy shaft-work, and he carried a long, iron-shod ash pole across his shoulders to keep his back muscles loose even when he wasn’t carrying his halberd.

He noticed me reading the board and turned his head. He didn’t sneer or puff out his chest. He just looked me up and down—checking my height, the way I carried my weight on my boots, and the hilt of my runic sword—and gave a short, businesslike nod.

"Eight o’clock tomorrow, First-Year," Mercer said, his voice a deep, gravelly baritone that carried easily over the quiet crowd. "Make sure your blade is sharp. I don’t want anyone saying I took my rank back from an unready soldier."

"I’ll be there at seven-fifty, Mercer," I replied calmly. "Bring a spare shaft for your halberd."

Mercer’s mouth twitched—not quite a smile, just the look of a man who liked a straight fight—before he turned and walked off toward the fourth-year dining hall with his friends.

Beside me, Kaelen looked away from the Top Ten slips and pointed a pale finger toward the bottom of the right-hand scroll, where the Rank 1000 elimination matches were listed.

"Look at bout fourteen," Kaelen said quietly.

Nia leaned in, squinting at the cramped black ink at the very bottom of the parchment, and let out a low breath.

Rank 1000 Elimination Bout: Cadet Harlan (Year 1, Rank 1000) vs. Cadet Clara Beck (Year 1, Rank 994).

The pudgy boy from our Geography class, and the merchant’s daughter who had just written crab-hunting notes on her shirt cuff ten minutes ago. Tomorrow morning, before noon, one of them was going to lose everything and be thrown out of the citadel.

I looked from the two names at the bottom of the scroll back to my own name pinned in red wax at the top.

"Come on," I said, turning away from the green lanterns and heading toward the dormitories. "Let’s go oil our gear. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day."