Shaji was miserable. Two years had passed since the day when the gods played the cruelest trick he could imagine upon him. Yet. The gods had proven several times that each time he thought he could sink no lower, there was yet another ladder to kick out from beneath him.

First he had been humiliated by his former slave, rather than the other way around which was proper. Then he had been branded a criminal, and the Law refused to believe his claims that he was of noble blood and sent him to a work camp. Or they refused to care, which was worse. Then some other things happened - for which he was most certainly not at fault, those idiot overseers had it coming! - and he had been sold as a common slave. Then his master had called him ‘unmanageable,’ and he had been sold not once, but twice more.

Then Baturya had come to his ‘rescue.’ He had thought that to be the ultimate humiliation in his life. He’d been wrong. In his head, he held out his defiance. In his head. The collar around his neck permitted that much privacy, at least. At least the servants of the Sudaman Sect, to whom he had been given in all but title, did not care whether he put on a cheerful expression as they set him about all of the unpleasant tasks.

Shaji remembered the days when Baty was the one helping the older servants with laundry, beating rugs, and scrubbing pots until his hands were chapped and raw. He remembered how he had mocked the younger boy for his meek obedience, complaining all the while of how he was forced to sit still all day while the tutors tried to drill into him all the knowledge which Baty was now soaking up like a sponge.

Shajita Makavian, third son of Dueque Makavian and grandson of Shiasbemu Makavian, did not enjoy the irony of the situation one bit. He was fourth in line to inherit a fiefdom, and yet he was a thousand leagues away from home, enslaved to an apathetic master who should instead be bowing before Shaji in submission. Shaji longed to run away, yet he could not. He had tried in the past and had not gotten very far. His collar marked him as a slave, and he could not remove it on his own. The Law took notice of wandering slaves, and saw to it that they were returned to their masters.

Shaji concluded one particularly unpleasant task involving chamberpots and journeyed to the men’s bath to cleanse himself. Hot water was a luxury he’d never appreciated until he was forbidden from it, and the only positive part of being assigned this particular duty was that he was permitted to use the same facilities as those Adepts who were purifying their bodies of impurities. Between Shaji after performing his duty and an Adept who had spent a session purifying their bodies, it was difficult to say which smelled worse. But the gardens needed their night soil, and so he was required to perform the miserable task.

The Adepts who saw him join them in the queue turned up their noses at him, as though they weren’t at least partially responsible for his present condition. Even the attendant turned up his nose as Shaji was issued his toiletries and directed to the private bath in which he would perform his ablutions. Private to avoid contaminating the larger communal bath, not because the Sect felt that Shaji warranted any level of privacy. No, like hot water, privacy was another earned luxury which he utterly failed to appreciate properly, brooding instead upon all the ways in which he had been wronged in the hours and days and weeks before.

He did take a moment out of his self-pity to enjoy sinking in to the near-scalding tub of soapy water. A moment. Then he was brooding again.

He would find a way to make them all pay!

The door burst open, and the attendant came in with a switch. “There’s a line outside! Finish scrubbing that filth off your body, then flush the water and scrub the tub for the next adept. If you take longer than fifteen minutes, I’ll send you home with stripes on your bottom and tears on your face like a child half your age.”

The attendant didn’t bother to wait for a response before leaving. He didn’t close the door behind him. Shaji could only grumble and begin to scrub himself furiously, because he knew for certain that the attendant made no idle threats. He managed to finish just inside the time limit, and was promptly joined by a boy whom Shaji had particularly come to hate.

“Hello Shaji. I see you have mostly avoided punishment today,” Sazobo said, the Adept calmly stripping and settling into the chamber. Shaji could only flush with embarrassment.

“And I see you’re no closer to catching up to either Ita or Baty,” Shaji taunted back. “Why don’t you just give up? It’s clear you have no talent.”

“I was older than both of them, and my life before I Awakened was harder. My family were tanners, after all. It’s natural that my body would have more impurities,” Sazobo calmly rebutted, stripping out of his soiled clothing right in front of Shaji as though Shaji were not far above him in station. Whatever the local Law might say, Shaji was the grandson of the Makavians! “The fact that the purification exercises are still expelling so much is actually encouraging. Still, it will be nice to move on to the second Reformation and catch up to Ita.”

“Didn’t Baty only take a few months to clear both the first and second Reformation?” Shaji challenged. That he was using his hated master’s genius to put down his hated master’s best friend did not register as incongruous in any way to him. “I’m telling you, you have no talent.”

Sazobo simply smiled, opening the valve to fill the tub with steaming water. “Shaji, your master is looking for you. He says your family has finally written back.”

Shajita froze for a moment, then rushed to dress in the clean undergarment wraps which were stored in the room as a convenience to the Adepts who couldn’t carry any cloth in with them without soiling it. The Adepts would have spare robes suitable to their rank and station handed to them by the attendants as they left, but Shaji would have to run home dressed as he was, as he was not allowed to wear even the white and red novice robes, and he had neglected to plan ahead and drop off a clean set of clothes before beginning his duty in the gardens.

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It wasn’t the first time he had run through the Sect compound in undergarments, and it wouldn’t be the last. Yet one more slight to add to the list. At his station, only his direct attendants should see him unclothed, and they should show the proper respect when bathing or grooming him.

At least Baturya had never insisted upon Shaji playing attendant. That would have simply been too much. The tasks that Shaji was responsible in keeping his master’s villa were humiliating enough. Baturya never complained when he slacked off, but one overseer or another would make weekly inspections to make certain that the teenage slave was keeping up with his duties. The punishment for failing to meet their standards was as humiliating as it was painful.

Worst of all, he had no sympathetic ear to voice his grievances. He had tried begging for leniency from Baturya, once, but the younger teen had simply shrugged and said “I can sell you to the mines if working at the Sect is too onerous for you, but I’ll have no control over your fate after that.” When Shaji had begged the Baturya to restore his freedom, again the boy had shrugged. “You’ve run up quite the sum in fines, Shaji, in case you’ve forgotten. The Sect is paying me for your work. Once you’ve worked off the fines for your crimes, I’m happy to set you free, if that’s what you want. Honestly, I don’t want you around either. I only bought you on a whim.”

While it was true that the Sudamans were paying for his work, it was at slave’s wages. It would take Shaji decades to work off his debts, especially when the cost of his meals and clothing were taken out of his earnings. Only the small room – barely a closet – in which Shaji slept was provided to him for free.

A chill wind made Shaji sorry for his lack of foresight as he left the compound proper into the hills where the villas lay. Baturya’s status within the sect was somewhat unclear, as he was technically walking an Unorthodox path, while the Sudaman Sect was strictly Orthodox. Yet the Sect was responsible for knocking him from the path he had been on due to the madness of one of their Masters.

Former Master Ryt, whose name was given the blackest mark in every record in which it was mentioned, had repaid a slight misunderstanding with a prideful and stubborn child with first robbery, then attempted murder. Only divine intervention from two dieties had saved Baturya’s life after Ryt had run him through and injected his core with ki laced with killing intent. Or so Baturya claimed; Shaji doubted the seriousness of the wound in the first place, and attributed the rest to the two supposed immortals who had healed him afterward.

However he had survived, the result was that Baturya walked an Unorthodox path now. In terms of the Orthodoxy, he had skipped over the fourth reformation and been forced through the third and fifth. The result was an impure ki, and significantly too much of it to purify easily.

In many ways, Shajita took pleasure in his master’s struggling to overcome his wounds, but, as he approached the villa they shared, he realized that this was not one of those times. Dread overcame him, fear, and anger.

Baturya was cultivating. The aura he gave off while doing so was terrible, filled with frightful and sometimes painful emotions. Baturya did not speak of what he experienced, and Shajita did not ask. He only cared how the younger teen’s meditations affected him personally, which was never in a pleasant way.

Baturya wasn’t alone in this. Shajita had learned a significant amount about cultivation in his years as Baturya’s servant, and he knew that cultivators transitioning from the third to the fourth Reformation often gave off such auras. He had experienced it himself as Ita, the crazy Kastazee girl who was infatuated with Baturya, sought to bring balance to her turbulent ki.

The difference between the feeling of an orthodox Adept cleansing their aura and Baturya doing the same was one of magnitude. Whereas Ita might give off an uncomfortable feeling from across the room, Baturya’s negativity could be felt on the path leading up to the villa.

Shaji bit his lip as he debated what to do next. It would be time for the evening meal soon, but since his injuries Baturya had been taking his meals at irregular intervals. And when he was cultivating he lost track of time. It was entirely possible that Baturya would continue to project that horrible aura straight through the night if Shaji did nothing, yet the only way to interrupt his master was to push through the terrible miasma. Miserable as it would make him, it might have been better to seek refuge in Sazobo’s private room, where he could sleep on the floor.

His need to know what his father had written won out. He had always known that his freedom would come immediately after word reached home of his situation, but although Baturya insisted that he had written to the Makavians several times, no response had been forthcoming. Baturya had gone so far as to allow Shaji to read the letter after it was written, and to bring it to the postmaster himself.

Word should have taken only a few days, but communication in the empire had inexplicably become terribly unreliable. The pigeon post had been completely wiped out in coordinated clandestine attacks. Some of those responsible had been captured and hanged, while others had been pardoned, while still others remained at large. No unified explanation for the attack was given, while rumors and theories abounded.

The price for a message by pigeon was expensive in the best of times. To send a single paragraph the distance it would have to travel would cost a quarter as much as Baturya had actually paid for Shaji. With few pigeons surviving the onslaught, that method was simply unavailable, leaving only the land and sea post routes.

They had sent messages via both. They had sent second messages when news that bandits and pirates had grown brazen enough to target the mail. Once again the culprits were caught and hanged, but the disruption to communication throughout the empire was a blow to both economy and morale. Business throughout the empire relied heavily upon the reliability of the post; even Shaji knew that. But he only cared about the part which affected him personally; every disruption delayed his salvation.

Two years had they tried to get word through to the east. Two years had Shaji labored so far beneath his station that outrage was an entirely insufficient word to describe the situation. Now finally his father would have sent the coin necessary to free him from his bonds, and Shaji could use whatever was leftover to secure passage home.

So he pushed through the miasma that was Baturya’s aura. He bit his lip and he strode forward, determined not to let the fear and anger and pain affect him. He needed to read that letter!

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