Chapter Four

The hall was packed with scholars, some of them bleary from the revelries she'd missed out on, some bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, having rested and breakfasted properly before coming here. Carza felt in an awkward middle-ground between the two extremes. She wasn't bleary, but... dammit, she wasn't feeling particularly bushy-tailed either. She'd eaten tea cake and nothing else. And unlike the bright-eyed eager ones who talked excitedly, she was... notably alone. Alright, they were playing a prank on her now, no-one had the time for this much socialisation. Was she the only one who took her studies seriously? She had three years to cram a huge amount of information into her head, maintaining the correct level of success to continue her work, impressing a small host of tutors and professors... it was an ordeal, and these people were able to do that while socialising? Nuh-uh. Not a thing. No way. It was physically and temporally impossible, there were not enough hours in a day to accommodate that sort of thing. Hull yawned besides her. And yet... he was graduating too, right beside her. And he'd done a serious subject, one that demanded language skills and... probably a little outdoorsmanship. Presumably he'd maintained the right standard of work to stay a scholar, so...

...was she an idiot? Probably. But what kind of idiot? The kind that needed to sacrifice a social life to maintain her work? Or the kind that simply failed ot understand what others apparently did effortlessly. Hull and Carza had bickered the entire way here - their tastes didn't remotely align on theatrophone shows. He liked bawdy comedies. She liked gentle satire. He liked serious dramas about people doing impressive things. She didn't like dramas at all. If she wanted to see serious people doing serious things, she'd just go and do something serious. Why bother listening to actors pretend to be serious? And the other dramas... alright, at minimum they were united on that point - the worst of the weepies were gutter-trash and should be euthanised for the sake of the people of ALD IOM. He commented that that view probably made both of them a little elitist. Carza sniffed. Fine. If being elitist meant having good taste, then call her a shameless elitist. Call them both elitists. They were feeling pretty damn elite today, they were graduating.

Nice.

The hall was long, wide, and like all the oldest structures in the Court of Ivory, made from stone. She felt... a little intimidated. It wasn't very high, for one - the ceiling was low. It was a chamber for old, respected rites - and those chambers were invariably very old indeed, built back in the early days of the Court, when things were different and in some ways simpler. They said that places like this were once built in shallow basements, but times changed, and the world was sinking. That was one of the theories of the world, once. That the world was part of a great, slowly descending column of earth - and the world was an air bubble trapped in the immense flow. The slow pulsing of a giant's heart carrying them further and further and further along... and sometimes you could tell. As buildings sank into the earth and were swallowed whole, taken into the flow and carried away. They said the undercity of ALD IOM was miles downwards... but so much had collapsed or was sealed off that there was no way of telling. Once, this place was an isolated sanctuary for the chosen of the Founder. Now, it served for graduations.

And on all sides, the holy words of the Founder. No drawings. In those days, it was thought that drawings could consume the minds of those they depicted - anything too similar could trick the soul and steal it away. The Founder had warned against witches who painted with deep, rich pigments and used these paintings as vessels to snatch away people's souls. People had moved away from that doctrine, but here... here things were dour and strange, and the walls were lined with carvings inlaid with silver. Gold was for the surface. Silver was the Founder's favourite metal, supposedly. He liked how it could capture starlight within it, and thus he carried a necklace of silver into the earth when he prowled the passages beneath the mountains. Where he spoke with the old Legates. Even now, Carza barely understood any of the words... only scraps of the sacred language were taught. It was a privilege to know it, and she had maybe earned the right to a few passages. And nothing more. She wasn't ready for them.

But she knew one thing. Told to her in a quiet, dark room by one of her tutors.

QUZ AXAXAXA UQLON. The favoured phrase of the Founder. One of his most famous aphorisms, engraved over the offices of every scholar, over the gateways to every outpost of the Court of Ivory, every library they opened and every laboratory they established. She'd been taught, and she could see the phrase repeated over and over across the hall. The sacred language was difficult to learn not just because it was forbidden, but because... well, it was hard. It described concepts strangely. QUZ AXAXAXA UQLON meant... it was described as the quiver of the brain into consciousness, and the refinement of primordial chaos, the invitation to elaborate further, and a scream of 'I AM' into the dark. It could be translated as the feeling which endured after the words 'and...?' was spoken, or the nervousness which prompted people to keep talking when silence fell around them, or the scream of a child which wakes up in the middle of the night and is afraid of the nothingness. It had no literal translation - none that they knew of, at least. The sacred language could only be approached that way, through lengthy explanations which exceeded the length of the word significantly. It was one of her few windows into the language, and... and she relished it. It made her feel more stable here, in this underground sanctuary from the days when maybe a dozen people would be initiated at once.

Now, she could barely see past the scrum of robed bodies. She realised just how few of her colleagues she knew. She hadn't spoken much as a child, and had been faintly standoffish. Maybe she'd just... missed the boat, so to speak. Missed that vital early phase of socialisation which made the rest come across easily.

...Founder, she hoped she hadn't missed the boat completely.

That sounded ghastly.

The rite would be silent. And silence spread like a wave through the crowd - she could imagine how it began. Some of the elders shooting the students at the front a sharp glare, the students silencing... and those behind them following suit, over and over and over. A rushing wall of silence... and finally, a clunk. The metal doors at the end of the room had been shut. And it began.

There were no words.

But she could hear people moving.

She wondered what was happening. No-one had told her about this part of the rite - all she knew was that students walked into this room, the door shut, and they left with tattoos on their foreheads and seven tokens in their pocket to give to the other courts, proclaiming themselves as they did so - each court should know the names of the movers and shakers of ALD IOM before they got to their moving, shaking, and other assorted motions, after all. Hull was silent beside her, his eyes losing all of their bleariness and sharpening up in a way that, to her, somewhat justified him being here at all. No-one with eyes that alert could be a complete moron. The hall was quiet... and she heard it again. Footsteps. A door opening and closing. Silence.

Silence.

She grew thankful for her boots. This was why they'd been permitted, when usually clunking around in boots was enough to be shushed by a thousand vengeful secretaries who were not going to deal with noisy students on top of everything else. They allowed her to rest a little, as the hours slowly, painfully ticked by. The cake sat like a brick in her stomach - she regretted eating it, regretted the tea as well. Should've just gone in empty, relied on her own endurance to get through the wait. She was pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with the others, could feel the nervousness radiating. Hated being this tightly-packed... and the room was stiflingly hot. She felt her breath crawl out of her throat with each passing second, before hot air slithered back in with all the smoothness of a razor-edged pill. She felt parched in minutes, and a little wobbly after the first hour. Sometimes she was able to shuffle forwards, and the sound of so many people moving at once was enough to fill the stifling air with small exhalations, the sound of movement that split the silence like a tidal wave... she worried about her hair. Worried that sweat was soaking into it, making it even worse than it usually was. Hull kept moving besides her, and she shot him a look...

He was wearing slippers.

...oh, the poor idiot. The poor, complete idiot.

A moment of hesitation.

He looked to be suffering. Should've brought boots. She wanted to linger in her smugness at her own preparation, but... he looked really uncomfortable. Painfully so. A second passed...

And she shuffled slightly to him, and nudged him with one shoulder.

He glanced.

And leant on her shoulder lightly, using her to stabilise himself a little as he lifted one foot up, then the other, then back to the first - just to excite some circulation, and to give his feet a small rest. Seemed the decent thing to do, even if his taste in comedies was awful. He didn't flash her a winning smile or anything so gauche - simply nodded thankfully, and tried not to make the experience too unpleasant. She didn't mind. The alteration in sensation was wonderful - cut a little through the stifling stagnation of this place. The words on the walls were running together, the metal inlay sweating as breath after breath filled the place up, barely dispersed by tiny vents plugged into the ceiling with what she imagined was great reluctance. Youngsters shouldn't need breathable air, a functional atmosphere was a privilege, not a right. Oh, she was getting cranky. That was a bad sign, she was usually a ray of sunshine by her own estimations. When placed in the company of herself and no-one else, she was easily the most optimistic person there.

Oh, Founder, she'd spent three years of her life locked in her rooms studying.

This odd person leaning on her shoulder was possibly the first thing in her scholarly career that counted as a real, genuine acquaintance she could bump into in the middle of the street, recognise, and have a quick spot of tea with.

A moment of unpleasant introspection - the reason she wanted to have her own stable of secretaries was because then she'd have a decent number of people who had to hang out with her and listen to her complaints and thoughts. Of which she had many.

...no, that was just the stuffy atmosphere making her weird. She wanted secretaries because her father had secretaries, and he was... sort of her ballpark for success. He had an office. Secretaries. As much cake as he wanted. Warmth. Safety. Security. Respect. And power, in a sense. More power than she'd ever had.

The group kept going forwards, and she was gratified to see those around her were just as nervous, if not more so. But then she looked up... and felt that gratification fade. The words were still moving, slithering like gleaming snakes. Definitely just being surrounded by such an awful atmosphere, but... she couldn't understand the words when they weren't swimming blearily, so there was an awful temptation to start seeing the shifting words making sense. To convolute until they resolved into something understandable. Capital letters, one after the other, aligning into long, dense words, paragraphs which lacked any meaning, random assemblages which never quite settled into something truly comprehensible. Always the refrain. QUZ. AXAXAXA. UQLON. The excitation of the brain. The invitation to elaborate. Images of the Founder, head shaved, eyes burning with unnameable fires, skin bristling with tiny eye-like growths as he prepared for his final flowering... clutching a long, thin sewing needle. A needle of thought. Inspiration, he said, was a needle. Inspiration was the ice-cold spike which enters the mind and alters everything around it. In the old days, elders would be compelled to have tiny silver needles embedded in their scalps to show their allegiance to the Court. Nowadays they settled for the tattoos, the normal ritual scars, and nothing more.

She wondered if the weight of the building above would make this chamber collapse one day. The ceiling heaved and groaned, it seemed to pulse like a living thing... it was supporting too much. It was trying to hold up far, far, too many rooms. It was just one low, ugly chamber, it was never meant for this... and it had sank through the earth nonetheless. A story came to mind. An ugly story. One that had been bastardised down the centuries... but still had some relevance. Skoulik, a city far to the east. Skoulik of the Loam. Skoulik which gave itself up to the deep places. Skoulik, whose histories declared that the earth would swallow them one day. They would be returned to the involutions of the great underground rivers - they were nothing but flotsam floating on the exhalations of a great divinity. And so they buried themselves. Shovelful after shovelful, day after day, year after year, filling each room and covering each building... until their ankles were sucked under into the mud, and their fingers were worn to the bone... and the earth rose higher and higher but the job was incomplete.

They said the citizens of Skoulik now squirmed through the loam and soil. That their bones had been squeezed to paste by the pressure of the ground. That they were always burying their city deeper and deeper, that they slept through the winters when the earth was too hard to move, and in the rain their tongues, long and pale, slithered through the earth and lapped at the droplets. It'd been a game back when she was young. Founder, she was in a grim mood, thinking about her youth... the other toerag urchins had found small white points in the soil. Just small stones, or mushrooms, or something innocuous. But the dares had begun. To step on the tongue of someone from Skoulik, to tug the tongue and see if the citizen came up wriggling and boneless... to kiss one of them. They became slithering things that lived in nightmares and pointless games. She grew out of the nightmares. And then the games. And then... then they just became a vague story. One which seemed to have sprung from nowhere, and had no real purpose. Anthropologically, it was meaningless. Reflected nothing. Simply buried meaning and reason within itself, and emerged as nothing but a bizarrely convoluted explanation for... nothing.

Children's stories. Like the best ones - the kind deeply unsuitable for children that mostly served to terrify them.

But now she felt the force of those old nightmares which made her sleep on high walls and in tree branches. That made her nervous to set foot on the ground in the morning. She could feel them around her. Pale bodies. Boneless faces. Long tongues. Fingers which ended in tiny iron nails, all the better for digging. Teeth gone, only gaping throats through which oil could be swallowed. Eyes lost to the dark, to the things which gnawed at anything soft and fleshy. Anything like her. Almost instinctually, she leant slightly into Hull. Just wanted to be reminded that others existed. He glanced at her, surprised... but did nothing. No words were exchanged. The crowd continued. They were close to the front, now. She could see fragments of the front of the hall, which was... something. The words continued, the holy book carved into the living rock, And then... a mural. Simple. Just black paint slathered on the grey stone. A silhouette, a tall, thin man... and in his torso, an iron door. Carza's eyes widened as she saw a student led through the door by one of the gowned elders. It closed softly... but she could feel the thump of great weight being displaced. She remembered being initiated as a student, and the key that had been placed on her lips.

A key that she'd been instructed to carry for the rest of her time as a student.

She felt it around her neck now, always weighted with more than metal - with symbolism, with history, with curiosity.

She saw the mounds of keys scattered around the door. Used to unlock it.

...the room was growing emptier. Where did the others go? Did they ever come back out?

Why were their keys unclaimed?

She felt her breath increase.

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There was something terrifying about that door.

It was smooth and unfashioned. It was prosaic and heavy. It had a single handle, a single keyhole... and nothing emerged from it. No sounds, no returning students. She wondered if she was one of the failures. If this was where failures were sent. Or if there was a final test, not just some relaxing ceremony. She'd... she'd assumed the silence from the other scholars on the topic had been coyness, or some kind of hazing thing. Hull departed from her shoulder, bracing himself and standing on his own two feet with barely a single grimace of pain. She resisted the urge to clutch at her elbows in nervousness. It was petty and pathetic, but she wanted her doll back - she liked her doll, even if it was painfully childish. A bead of sweat trickled down her forehead. The door loomed large in her imagination, and the silhouette around it seemed hungry, the black space of its body and head made the iron door seem like the entryway to a monstrously huge mouth. The elders were in sight now, and they simply... stood.

Their robes were different to the ones she'd seen before. Ceremonial, had to be. They looked ancient, and had strange embroidery - not remotely a modern style.

It was bizarre, but she missed the squeals of theatrophones connecting to the central stations, the roar of trains entering distant stations, the clicking of typewriters and the ever-present thump of printing presses at work, or the constant bubble of voices in the city beyond, louder than ever these days. She loved the silence and peace of the Court of Ivory, but now, she would do anything for noise. Anything more than the laboured breathing of colleagues she barely knew. Were these her colleagues? Were they plants of some kind? Was this all a practical joke aimed at her in particular? Were they her executioners, or fellow prisoners? Her breathing increased. She was trapped, and needed to get out. The closeness had become suffocating. The labyrinths of words all around seemed to spiral into infity. A shuffle - the crowd had moved, she was closer than ever to the iron mouth. A student walked forward, and she glanced around nervously. Her key was taken. The door was unlocked. It swung smoothly, the hinges dripping with inky-black oil and bark-brown grease. Nothing lingered inside. Stone, that was all she could see... the student entered, and Carza wanted to scream for her to stop, for her to hold back and reconsider, or to ask some questions, any questions...

The door closed, and the walls rumbled.

Like a stomach churning through a scrap of meat.

She gulped.

Needed to get out. Didn't care how she did it. Was going to get out of here wasn't going to die wasn't going to die wasn't going to-

She felt Hull squeezing her hand.

A sharp glance confirmed that it was, indeed, him. He smiled sympathetically, and pulled exaggeratedly at his collar - he was suffering too. He didn't understand what she was thinking, but... no, no, he looked nervous. But he was here still. She squeezed his hand back. Safe. She was safe. She was fine. He slowly, carefully passed her a scrap of paper, torn from something his pocket. Only a second to study it before it vanished away again.

Try and think about your subject.

She could see his lips moving, reciting something she didn't really understand. Something... oh. Oh. Yes, yes, focus on anthropology and linguistics, focus on things she understood and she was good at. Great advice. Excellent, even. Alright, alright... yes, marriage, think about marriage. A bundle of rights associated with the conjunction of two people in a union, often with a focus on procreation either of a biological or symbolic nature - the continuation of a house being, sometimes, solely a matter of marriage to add more family to the matter, without the necessity of procreation. Monogamy, polygamy, polyandry... adelphic polyandry practised by the old clans that once lived in the rolling pastures now occupied by the Court of Horn. The practice of a woman marrying multiple different brothers from another family. The Court of Horn had found the practice repugnant, and had promptly outlawed it - but that had been centuries ago, the only records being polemics against the polyandrists written by slightly later commentators. A theorist closer to her own generation thought it was a solution for infertility induced over the years through inbreeding and disease - share a woman between male members of a family to try and produce offspring by any means necessary. Notably, one of her tutors thought it was all a myth, made up to slander these clans by their new rulers.

She could feel her breath steadying. Alright. She could do this. She could definitely do this.

She stepped forward... and now there was no-one in front of her.

Carza vo Anka could not do this.

The person beyond vanished, and an elder set his eyes on her - a silent order. She was next. Hull squeezed her hand once more, and let her go. Minutes passed, and the door remained adamantly closed. Finishing off the incinerations, or maybe removing the body, or maybe cleaning up the mess left behind by whatever thing, whatever mutant they kept for bad students. Founder, no wonder she'd been with Hull, he was a failed student too...

No, no, think of... think of the feasting practices of the Court of Lime compared to the Court of Salt which overwhelmed it and replaced it. An emphasis on wealth destruction replaced by an emphasis on wealth accumulation. Large feasts featuring mass sacrifice followed by smaller meals between friends - more cost-effective, and often very, very frugal and tasteful. Reflection of changing standards of value and wealth - from sheer quantity to more refined quality. A theorist she knew had speculated that it was reflectivce of the name - salt ought to be used sparingly, use too much and food becomes inedible. It must be tasteful and precise, the majority must be kept in a salt cellar. Right, right, sure, that worked, and why didn't she try and blackmail someone in the Court of Salt? Oh, right, yes, because they were all freaks who the other urchins said had carved their souls into pieces so they could sell them in the most cost-effective fashion possible. Sell them to their ashy gods. Spite helped focus her. Screw them. She was here. And she repeated those words - QUZ AXAXAXA UQLON. She looked at the door, spoke those words in her mind, and translated them.

And...?

So what? Just a door. Been through plenty of things, she had. She was, in relative terms, an expert at doors. She was good at doors, if she was examined on going through doors, she'd come out with flying colours.

Rambling.

She was good at rambling, if she was examined on rambling, she'd come out excellently, and in relative terms, she was an expert at-

Shut up.

She stared ahead.

A hand rested on her shoulder. She leant into it, imagining it was Hull, and...

Wrong sort of hand.

An elder pushed her forwards, and she stumbled slightly, her boots clacking with nauseating volume on the floor. She wanted to smoke. She wanted to drink, and eat, and sleep, and do lots of things... but she drew the key out from below her clothes with panicked speed when a hand presented itself. The elder inserted the key, turned... and the door opened with silence, once more weeping oil and grease to the ground. She could see pits in the rim, on the other side, smoothed out for the side facing the crowd. Little pits, little flecks of brown, a sense of... she knew this metal. Read about it, at least. Meteoric iron. Star-metal. The believers in the earth-column had thought that meteorites were proof of the cavern ceiling above them, the end of their air pocket, raining down tiny chunks to slam into the world below. But scholars knew better - they knew of the curvature of the earth, the orbit around the sun, and the impacting of chunks of rock. Planet-seeds, they sometimes called them. And the surge of superiority she felt helped her step into the dark.

And faded as the door slammed shut.

Her breath caught in her throat.

Darkness and stone. No carvings. This was raw rock, smoothed by the passage of people but otherwise unshaped. She could see natural distortions and cracks, leering smiles leading into nothing... and the corridor before her. This was a natural chasm. Had to be. And... there was no way but forwards. Her hand still tingled from where Hull had squeezed it. It was odd, but... the validation of a stranger meant way too much to her. Melqua, her father, the secretaries... they were nice, and she liked almost all of them, but... they were familiar with her. They knew what she'd come from, compared to which anything was impressive. Hull had known none of that. She was simply a peer, and he regarded her with respect for her own, present-day merits. He had no gradient, no continuum to place her on. And... and he'd given her good advice. Peer-to-peer advice. Equal-to-equal.

She stepped into the dark, boots clicking out a steady rhythm on the eerily dust-free floor - the dust churned up and moved by hundreds of passing feet - and stared ahead with her intense brown eyes, tossing aside a strand of ungainly brown hair as she went.

Founder, she wanted a smoke...

* * *

"There is a flaw in you."

Carza froze.

The voice had echoed from ahead of her... or beside her head? There were cracks everywhere, more leering smiles. Anyone could be hiding in or behind them. Her fingers twitched desperately, and her voice was higher than she would've liked.

"...is there?"

"A flaw. You doubt. You fear. You do not know why you are here."

A flash of indignation.

"I'm here to become a scholar. I'm here to graduate."

"A scholar here once weighed his chest with stones to extract the preciousness of his last breath. His ribs folded inwards, yet he lived, and whispered wonderful things. He did it alone, in the dark, to speak secrets no-one else would understand. Some say his voice is embedded into the stone. Would you like to listen?"

She paused, and didn't reply. Silence reigned. She heard nothing. Nothing from the rock, nothing beyond it. The voice had faded. It was stern and authoritative, but had a dryness which made her think that the others had been asked these questions too. A minute, a long minute. She paused... and did nothing. She liked silence. And she knew that something wasn't going to kill her - she'd checked the floor repeatedly, and found no spots of blood. So either people were being hung and killed bloodlessly, or no-one had died. And she was just a paranoid idiot. And if so... fine. They wanted her to listen in silence? Then she'd listen.

So there.

Minutes. Minutes. Minutes.

An hour?

No. Just minutes.

And then some seconds.

A minute.

A handful of seconds for good measure.

And then five more minutes. She assumed. Maybe? She wanted to smoke so damn badly right now... the theatrophones had started to play cigarillo advertisements, and she listened to them religiously.

'Finest Krodaw Tobacco is grown in the rich fields surrounding the city of Krodaw, and each and every shipment is marked with the seal of approval from the colonial authorities of Mahar Jovan's two monarchies. So you know it's good-quality - fit for a king or a queen, and toasted by only the finest of tobacconists using the latest in theurgic advances. We take pride in offering royal quality to our most discerning patrons, and all for reasonable, even scandalously low prices.

Krodaw Tobacco. Because two kings can't be wrong.'

She paused.

And mentally hummed the little tune they played. Not her fault it got stuck in her head. And... it was very calming. This was how Carza operated - she planned ahead whenever possible, panicked when she had no time to plan, and withdrew into a weird shell of advanced coping mechanisms in order to endure through whatever was panicking her. Coping mechanisms that included smoking, old songs or tunes she could hum, strange advertisements she could improbably remember, anthropological discourse, and if all else failed, simply staring at something. She was blessed by the fact that her 'deeply alarmed and terrified' face was much the same as her 'deeply unstable and violent' face. Small mouth. Wide, staring eyes. Features frozen save for the occasional quiver. Hands balled into fists. And over time, a slight withdrawal of the lips from the teeth, making her look like a remarkably ungainly rodent.

A knock echoed through the tunnel, as if something outside was trying to get in, and the tune in her head stopped. Wasn't working. Needed something else. A moment of hesitation... well. Just a second wouldn't hurt. Carza swiftly withdrew her one special cigarillo and ran her nose along the surface, taking in the rich, toasted scent... because two kings can't be wrong.

"Don't sniff your narcotics in this holy place."

Barely managed to muffle her squeak.

But... but that sounded human. It sounded annoyed. Hoorah! Victory! By a certain definition!

And possible failure from graduation due to smoking habits! Oh no.

Carza mumbled 'sorry', and kept walking.

The voice was silent.

The tunnel continued for a little while, leading gradually and distinctly downwards, into the bowels of the earth. No carvings. Nothing but the occasional crack leading to... absolute darkness. The only illumination was provided by the light under the door, and that quickly faded, leaving her with so little light that she wondered if she'd fallen into one of the cracks. If she had been swallowed by the earth. Could've happened. It was likely, by a given definition, and... and she was nervous again. Time to hum in the confines of her own head. No wonder she hadn't really socialised in her three years of being a student - the time when she was meant to socialise, the studium had been highly regimented and confined, that was the antisocial period... anyway. No wonder she hadn't socialised. She could barely cope with a dark tunnel and a strange voice. She wandered on, fumbling over the walls, wincing every time her thin fingers fell through one of the cracks, and...

A chamber.

It opened up suddenly, like the earth had spontaneously manifested it in her way - a bulge in a great chthonic artery, a little clot bursting to life.

Small.

A chair in the centre.

An elder, garbed in black, face covered by a veil which looked like it'd been taken from a mummified corpse. The seal of the Founder hanging over his chest. And next to him, a bored-looking woman who was dressed in the bright red colours of a theurgist. Carza blinked, and instinctually tried to rearrange her thoroughly-dishevelled hair in a desperate attempt to seem presentable, and...

"Sit down."

The elder's voice was cold and quiet. He'd done this before. And he knew how it was meant to go. He continued.

"You have passed through the chamber of the silvered words. You have wandered beyond the iron door which confines the ignorant to their place, and the enlightened to theirs. You have travelled down the tunnel of ignorance, dark and full of pits to interrupt the passage of the foolish. And now you stand here. Your eye is ready to be opened."

Carza gulped.

"You will sit. And the mark of a scholar shall be placed on you. Thus has been decreed by the Founder, and thus is the rite of the Court of Ivory."

A pause

"Sit."

She sat in the leather seat with all due haste. She'd gotten this far without screaming at something or someone, she wasn't failing her damn graduation ceremony. The fabric of the seat was perspiring - many people had sat here, and all of them were nervous. The entire thing stank of fear... but at lest it didn't stink of blood or terror. The theurgist consulted her terralabe closely, muttering under her breath as the many concentric rings and dials twitched and flared, indicating the most subtle of environment changes.

"Stars are still interfering. Earth-currents are a bit off-course. Sun has progressed. I'll make the adjustments."

Theurgists still managed half the machines in ALD IOM. They knew their functions and the details of their functioning - and furthermore, they could operate machinery which had no real ability to be operated. They had their rites and their oddness, and their bizarre principles which feigned at science but never quite reached it... and now one was about to mark her forehead. Carza's head tilted back, and the theurgist quickly snapped two bands into place, over the chin and over the scalp, to keep her down and still. An alcohol-soaked cloth was dabbed over her forehead, and she found herself feeling vulnerable - her breath was coming in at an unusual angle, and it made her feel like she was drowning, or at least having an asthmatic attack. The theurgist, a middle-aged woman with long curls, grunted curtly.

"Hold still, and don't scream."

Her machine was a pulsing, twitching mess of metal, leather, and what looked like a mass of chainmail and copper wires... plus an unreasonable amount of fine walnut polished to a mirror sheen, and a few panes of glass giving way to... meaninglessness. It moved like a living thing, but it didn't seem to do much - just an irregular shape the size of her head, with a tube extended outwards with a long needle attached to the end. The theurgist talked good-naturedly as she started to prepare herself. She was a bored professional - to her, this was a tattooing, she had no interest in the spiritual elements. Carza wasn't sure whether to be relieved or offended by that fact.

"You're lucky, you know. A few hundred years ago, we'd have been soaking a bone needle in ink and threading it under your skin. Usually they just soused you lot in brandy and hoped you wouldn't wriggle too much. So, could always be worse."

A short laugh.

"Could be raining."

An even shorter laugh. Carza smiled nervously.

"...alright. That's... a relief."

"Should be. I wouldn't like to get tattooed like that. Bit like being crocheted, hm? Not for me, not for me. Now, hold still young lady, and I'll try to make a few straight lines. Hands are a little sore from all the others, so I might be a little hazy. Best stay very still, eh?"

Carza's eyes widened...

The needle descended...

Her fists clenched. Her eyes stared. Her mouth pulled back from her teeth to reveal glinting incisors.

And a young woman who looked like a mad rodent abruptly became a scholar. With the flowing of a needle, the injection of ink, the sculpting of a mark - a diamond with two of the corners filled in, almost like the corners of an eye - and the ritualistic chanting of her elder.

"You are ordained as a priest-scholar of the Court of Ivory. Inheritress to the Founder and his teachings, inheritress to the rites which established our court in the axis mundi, and built around us this city. You lay claim to the prestige and purpose of the order which has endured the invasions of the western heathens, and the northern savages, endured both and tamed them with reason, understanding, and sublime intelligence. You stand at the end of a thousand thousand years of perfect tradition, an eternal golden braid linking us to a time when the world was strange and a single wise man walked upon its surface. Do you recognise the weight of this?"

Her teeth were gritted as the needle made another pass.

"I do."

"You stand as a member of the doctrine of the anthropologist, of the student of human culture - its virutes and failings. You stand to record and explain the nature of these cultures, but not the structure of the universe, nor the function of the individual human. You stand to analyse society. Is the remit of your study acceptable?"

"It is."

"You are a reliquary of our traditions. A living monument to us and our purpose. What is this purpose?"

"To enlighten the unenlightened. To teach the untaught. To civilise the savage. To educate the heathen. To show a path to a greater world. A world carved from flawless ivory."

"Your thesis has been received. It has been reviewed."

He paused.

"It has been approved. Your study of the religious tendencies of the extinct Court of the Spear has been deemed worthy of entry to our archives. What is your response?"

"I am honoured. Sir."

"Recite your name."

Her voice grew louder.

"I am Carza vo Anka."

"Who are you?"

"A priest-scholar of the Court of Ivory."

"What vows do you swear?"

"To uphold the doctrines. To pursue my study. To adhere to the virtues."

Her hand was shaking and half-limp when the elder grabbed it, shaking it firmly.

She was Carza vo Anka, and she was a scholar.

Her bared teeth could've been terrified. Furious. Savage.

Or they could've been smiling.

Twenty-one years of life. Thirteen years since she arrived here.

And she'd made it.

She'd damn well made it.