Cyril haunted Gwyllion Abbey. He rummaged through the kitchen for any food for the morning. Coffee. Flour. Salt. No meat, no vegetables, no fruit. Bu might’ve mentioned the mess hall was out of commission before letting him stay there. Not that he could afford a room anywhere else.
When he lived there as a kid, Cyril remembered there was always a chef willing to rummage something for him. Or at least some food he could swipe from the ice chest. Even in the wee hours of the night, another warden would be out in the grinder running drills, or playing dice or rolling cigarettes. The quiet was more disturbing.
Beyond that, it was depressing. When Cyril left for the Central Continent, the old man was considering the construction of a new wing to accommodate more wardens. A mystery lay dormant in the time between his departure and his return. Something had sunk the guild into desolation. It could possibly be connected to what had prompted Bu to change their emblem as well. Cyril considered himself lucky the place was still there for him at all.
Cyril went back to his dorm. Bu let him have the same one from when he was a kid, the corner on the third floor, with two windows looking out towards the ocean. It was nice, if a lot smaller than he remembered. A sconce by the door held a stubby little candle. An empty bookshelf collected dust next to the window. There was a closet opposite that, also empty.
But on the right-hand side were cuts into the wooden siding. Bu had made them. A scratch marking Cyril’s height every birthday since his joining the guild. Cassidy’s were marked on the other side of same wooden panel. She stopped being taller than him around thirteen years old. Cyril remembered how happy that had made him. He wondered if Bu left the room vacant to protect the memories like that. Cyril felt guilty for not visiting in so long.
A knock at the door. Xin was there, sour and stern. They had been formally introduced after Cyril’s ‘job interview’ with Abine. The resemblance to Bu had faded with familiarity. The young man carried himself more formally. His back was stick-straight and he was careful to keep eye contact to whom he spoke. But, he was definitely Bu’s son. Cyril didn’t recognize him from the little kid he last knew.
“I didn’t actually expect you to be awake,” Xin said.
“Good morning to you too,” Cyril smiled. He got some sadistic rush out of his presence annoying the other wardens here.
“The boss wanted me to give you this.” Xin handed over a warden badge. The brass plate was smaller than Cyril’s palm, stamped with the emblem of the guild. Yesterday’s date was engraved along the rim. The badge was an easy identifier for wardens to prove their allegiance to legitimate guilds. Wardens were expected to carry the little plates on their person whenever they worked. SDO wardens even had a uniform. One of the few details against which Cyril had chafed.
Xin continued. “He also wanted me to tell you that you’ll be meeting your initiates here at the guild.”
“Initiates?” Cyril was snapped out of his pleasant daze. “Already? I was thinking I’d just take on a couple jobs we got. I gotta refresh the wardrobe, get a bite to eat.”
“You already have a job,” Xin said. He was not enjoying this conversation and made no effort to disguise that fact. “As a warden instructor.”
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“Whoa, whoa, back up. Instructor? Where’s your dad? I gotta straighten this out.”
Cyril pushed back the young man and called down for him, making for the stairs.
“The boss left,” Xin said. “He insisted he had some business to attend to this morning. Now I understand he just didn’t want to be the one to tell you all this. I should’ve known the old man didn’t intend to actually get anything done.”
Cyril paused halfway down the stairs. “You know, you were a lot nicer when you were seven,” he said.
“I was a lot dumber then,” Xin replied. A moment between them passed in uncomfortable quiet. “Your initiates will be here at tenth ring. Your job is to mold them into capable wardens so they may excel in their chosen profession. You will be paid a weekly stipend from their tuition fees.”
Tenth ring referred to the city’s bell tower. Most, if not all cities had a bell tower that announced the passage of the day. Hourglasses tracked the seconds and the minutes and the hours for timekeepers to report them regularly. Djinn developed the system in order to better instruct their human servants on when to do what. Now most things were measured in that same way.
“I’m not a teacher. How the hell am I supposed to mold some brats into ‘capable wardens?’”
“The details are left to your discretion,” Xin said. He pushed past Cyril on his own way down, sure to give the older man a bump on the shoulder. “Try not to lose us any clients.”
Cyril turned over this new reality in his mind. An instructor. He studied the badge in his hand. His stomach rumbled.
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The brief interlude allowed Cyril to run to a kitchen not far from the guild. They served him some muddy coffee and an underbaked little pastry with sausage clumsily stuffed inside. It sank into his stomach and sat like a rock. Cyril was taken aback to spend two notes on the whole affair, but left the little coins on the table.
Chewing through the meal gave him an opportunity to consider how to train complete strangers on performing the most difficult job in the world. As a kid, all Cyril wanted to be was a warden. He begged the wardens at Gwyllion Abbey to teach him. Few did. So Cassidy and he spent most of their time spying, stalking and obsessing over them. How they lived, how they trained, how they slept. Bu would throw in a few pointers here and there. Some wardens were always happy to give them a roughhousing in the grinder. But, everything important he’d learned as he worked.
It was a growing trend for new wardens to attend these instructional guilds, as they were being called. Teenagers would sign up, have their mommy and daddy throw in a couple hundred notes as tuition, and then the kids would get a letter of recommendation to start work at a real guild. Cyril always thought it was a clever scheme for lazy wardens to make bank without doing real work. Now he was just one of them.
At the SDO, he’d been an initiate for about three months. They called their new wardens “apprentices.” He worked under an Archwarden and then was approved to start handling jobs on his own. But, even then most of what he learned was how to not embarrass the guild. How to wear his uniform, how to file guild paperwork. You couldn’t even be an apprentice there without already proving your sorcery skills somewhere else.
He tried to remember the first real, tangible thing he’d learned. A conversation with Bu. When flames consumed a whole neighborhood on Lyrique, and the old man had quelled the monster that caused it.
“Anybody can be a warden,” Bu had told the young, weeping, soot-faced Cyril. “You only hafta accept the suffering others won’t.”
Deep in this fog of thought, Cyril almost missed the tenth ring from the bell tower. He escaped the restaurant and hurried back to Gwyllion Abbey. Cyril was absolutely certain he was going to screw these kids up.