Diverse, bloated, stretched, clawed, winged, spined, and envenomed, the latest batch of warbeasts moved down through the academy terraces like a pack of dogs, crawling, flopping, slithering, and loping their way towards the gate.

It was like a parade; twenty grotesque living weapons, as deformed in body as their creators were in soul. Led by a Reeve I didn’t know, they moved without coercion. They didn’t need the rod or whip. They didn’t even need leashes. They understood their instructions and followed them.

The person responsible for making them stood watching from the edge of an upper terrace. Master Sectus. Short, slender, with skin that was criss-crossed with gray, like he’d had the color caned out of him with a birch branch.

He looked so small and insignificant from down here. He could have been a merchant’s bookkeeper, or a village healer. His face could have been capable of wearing a kind expression, if he’d been anyone else. Here, now, at the end of the path Antorx had laid out for him, the path he had taken, he was the monster behind the monsters. He’d worked on the war beasts with the academy’s blessing and the help of others, but he was the one most directly responsible.

It would have been justice for him to die, I thought. For him to fall off the mountain, or be mortally wounded by an experiment gone wrong, or assassinated by an ambitious student.

I’d never thought dispassionately about another person’s death before. Not even when the other boys in Kirkswill were tipping wood shavings down my shirt. It had always been beyond the pale. But after a month at the academy I was finally starting to get there. I was finally starting to hate Antorx.

When I’d been an innocent scribe’s apprentice in my home village of Kirkswill, I’d had different feelings. The Antorxians had been a distant threat. I’d heard the war stories from elders about the monsters they unleashed in battle, the brutal tactics, executing Losirisian leaders until they found one who’d collaborate. I’d heard of their persecution of Losiris’s native mages — the wizards, with their mighty words and enchanted staffs. I’d heard of the book burnings and executions.

All that was enough to make me fear the Antorxians. It was enough to dislike them, even to be disgusted by them. But to hate, I felt like a measure of knowledge was needed.

Over the last four weeks, I’d come to know them better. I knew the Antorxian soldiers, with the grim devotion to their Empire, more loyal to that abstract idea than their rulers, and more loyal to those rulers than each other. I knew the Reeves even better, most of them cruel, some of them mad, but all of them wielding power with complete conviction that power itself was the greatest good.

They’d forgotten what it meant to be human. Their flesh was transitory, always able to be replaced through fleshcrafting, and if their new flesh didn’t feel touch and pain the same way as real flesh, then all the better.

They’d lost any respect they ever had for the human form, willing to twist failed students into beasts for their armies. They obviously had no mercy. I thought they probably did have empathy, in that they could imagine what it would be like to be gentled themselves, but they simply didn’t care. If it led to power, then the path was righteous. It was the only path for them. The Sovereign’s path.

As I looked on their latest troupe of warbeasts, I thought I knew enough now to hate them.

The group reached the lowest terrace and passed through the gate. A pair of wagons and a squad of soldiers were already waiting outside to escort them, another batch of weapons for Antorx’s wars. They set off together, marching down the mountain road as a single column. I stood at the edge of the barracks terrace watching them go.

Somewhere overhead a hawk was circling, a black speck against an iron-gray sky. The wind was picking up. It felt like a storm was blowing in.

I felt like I didn’t know what to do with my hate.

I could unleash it all in one pointless, probably suicidal strike, like I had on the day the other students had been taken. But that would do nothing to the Reeves and end up badly for me.

I could run, but I’d seen the spirits of those who’d run. It still seemed like a death sentence.

I could even let myself fail my assignments, joining the monsters being sent to feed the Antorxian’s ongoing war. Or I could stay and work. I could become a sorcerer.

If I could learn their lessons and still stay myself, then it might be worth it. If I could learn what they had to teach while keeping my humanity and my respect for humanity, then maybe I could turn around and do something about them.

I just wasn’t sure that I could learn their lessons without becoming one of them. Every task they gave us, whether we could see the logic in them or not, was another knock of the hammer that was shaping us in their image.

The procession passed behind a crag of rock and went out of sight. I turned away.

The departure of the new warbeasts wasn’t the only activity happening in the academy.

On the library terrace, a market had sprung up. Students had dragged tables out of their private lodges and communal buildings and made them into makeshift stalls, with a variety of hand-made wares spread across them.

Apparently a monthly event, it was an opportunity for the more craft-oriented students to gain resources from the more martial ones in exchange for things that only they could make. They traded weapons, armor, tools, and knowledge for money or barter.

The currency of the land was the Antorxian duc, an irregularly round silver coin as wide as an eye and embossed with the tripeak symbol of the Antorxian emperors. I obviously had no money, but there had to be a way for the coins to make it into the student population from the outside world. Maybe the students traded with the soldiers. A magical tool with its own source of maja might be prized among non-mages, a magical weapon more so.

I had to pass through the market on my way to the library and I found myself staring like a farmer’s son on his first trip to town.

There was clothing and armor for sale; shirts, breastplates, mail shirts, shields and bucklers, helmets, greaves, and bracers. I saw magical trinkets like my spirit siphon, and books and scrolls that had presumably been written by the students themselves. Weapons were another popular offering, though most stalls limited themselves to spears and blades.

I stopped at one stall where a thin man in a dark gray robe was selling feather swords, the traditional long blade of a sorcerer. Each one was around three feet from hilt to point, with an extremely thin single-edged blade. I knew from The Opening Arts of Arrenshu that the hilts were weighted to bring its center of balance very close to the hand.

They were almost useless in the hands of anyone but a sorcerer. With its thin blade it needed the speed, strength, and additional effects maja could provide to be an effective weapon.

The student running the stall noticed me looking.

“Forty ducs for simple sword,” he said, ignoring all the signs that I was just a destitute initiate. “Two hundred if you want one enchanted.”

The prices shocked me. Two hundred ducs… The same weight in silver would get someone a house in Kirkswill. I swallowed, trying to sound like an interested buyer.

“How are they enchanted?” I asked.

“Some are spirit scrived, some are inscribed with cantograms. Flexibility versus reliability.”

His eyes narrowed as he caught sight of the badly crafted scabbard at my hip. “You don’t look like much of a sword guy.”

I walked off before he could retaliate against me for wasting his time.

I slowed at a stall selling traditional scribe’s supplies. Pens, paper, glue, and ink all vied for my attention, begging to be bought. I didn’t bother asking for prices. I didn’t have a single coin on me. And I didn’t fool myself into thinking anything I had or could make would be worth much in trade.

I had a little maja-infused ink left, and that was coarse and low-quality. To make anything better, or to make paper, or real pens, I’d need better equipment than I had now, and I’d need money to trade for equipment. It wasn’t a field where I could pull myself up from nothing.

I left the market behind, thinking about what the weaponsmith had said about enchanting.

Putting a cantogram on steel would need maja-infused wire at least, and probably tools for etching. Spirit scriving would involve coaxing a spirit to dwell inside a weapon and cooperate with its wielder, which was an even more distant possibility for me. Spirit contracts were an entire other field of sorcerous study which I hadn’t so much as touched.

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The library hadn’t changed from the outside.

It was still an idiosyncratic building made from assorted stones, laid with slapdash mortar. The ancient timbers of the roof were still in place. The bronze doors were open, which was new. The flickering blue light of the lanterns inside was visible through the doorway, tinting the gray light coming from the clouded sky.

Stepping inside, I was shocked to see someone had set up lanterns all the way down the stairway. Now we wouldn’t have to descend irregular smooth stone steps in total darkness. The reduction in accidents alone would probably boost Antorxian military strength dramatically over the next few years.

Inside, down the stairs and through the second set of doors, the library had been transformed.

Most of it was still shadowed in darkness, that hadn’t changed, but now small orbs of blue light drifted through the shelves as Antonyx’s spirit servitors patrolled the isles holding dim blue lanterns.

The books were no longer chained to isolated plinths, but sorted onto wooden shelves. The shelves themselves had been organized, standing in straight rows as far as the light from the stairs stretched, and every one of them was marked with a brass plate engraved with a number.

Scrolls were no longer piled, but sorted into gridded cubbies. The books sat flush with the edge of the shelves, their spines displayed, where the title was written on the spine, or else they were sitting with their covers facing out.

It was as if some great organizing force had swept in and fixed every problem the library ever had. Now it matched up better with what I thought a library should be. I couldn’t approve of much the Reeves did, but I approved of Master Antonyx’s work here.

I dropped my pack on the ground and pulled out my new candle, as well as the index Antonyx had given me for a reward.

The candle was from Terese, a twist of sackcloth soaked in pine resin and wrapped around a wooden rod. I lit it from one of the blue-flame lamps and looked down at my index.

I wanted structured magic. Cantograms. I was sick of trying to read in the dark and I was sure cantograms would be the answer.

The servitors added an eerie presence to the library as I made my way through the library. They appeared as shadowy figures moving between the shelves. At least the lanterns they carried let me keep track of them, so they wouldn’t just be jumping out at me from the shadows.

That was more than I could say for the students.

I froze at the sight of a white shape moving in the darkness ahead of me. Deep in the shadows it was hard to see. I got the impression of something large and gangly. It was the kind of sight that would send me running home if I’d seen it in Kirkswill. Here, I was starting to get used to seeing horrors.

I hesitated briefly then continued walking towards it.

As I got closer, my candlelight revealed the bulges and angles of a pale gray war beast, a spindly four-legged creature with useless bat wings sprouting from its shoulders. It was wrapped in linen and leather armor, worn over soft scales of gray fleshcrafted skin. A mane of greasy black hair sprouted from its otherwise bald head. The head was eyeless, with a pair of large nostrils an inch above a wide sharp-toothed mouth.

Its keeper stood near it. I recognized her. She was the student I’d seen with Ba a few weeks ago.

I looked from her to the creature. The warbeast had the same distinctive scar on her forehead I’d seen on Ba, and on the other warbeasts, two pinrpicks flanking a vertical cut. I realized that this creature was Ba, just with more fleshcrafting work.

The sorcerer looked up at me as I approached. She looked down at my candle, sneering, before turning back to the book she was reading.

“Is this Ba?” I asked her.

The warbeast turned its head towards me. It no longer had eyes, but it sniffed the air deeply. Its jagged lipless mouth dropped open.

“Oh, it’s you,” the sorcerer said, glancing at me again. “Don’t try and command her again. I’ve updated her instructions. They’re iron-clad.”

Ba turned her head to sniff the woman. Her hair swayed around her neck, the oil-damp strands clinging to skin and each other. I could still feel her maja, if I felt for my spiritual senses. She glowed with a feeling that was both sharp and soft, like needles lurking beneath the surface of a cushion.

“Who did she used to be?” I asked.

The sorcerer looked up, fixing me with a curious gaze.

“She used to be called Dorela. She was my friend.”

“Don’t you have a problem with what’s happened to your friend?” I asked.

“A problem? What do you mean?” she said. She turned to look Ba over. “She’s a good piece of work, even if I do say so myself.”

“You did that to her yourself?”

“Yes. This was our arrangement. If either of us failed, then the other would lodge a bid for their new form. She wanted me to look after her, even when she was no longer herself. Luckily it was my proposal which won out.”

I felt my stomach doing flips during her explanation. The woman had reshaped her friend into this. And the friend had wanted her to.

It was somehow worse, knowing I was looking at someone’s interpretation of kindness.

“Would you like to see a combat demonstration?” the sorcerer asked. “I’ll be pleased to show you, if you don’t take your pathetic light and go.”

I looked away and started walking. I tried not to see Ba in my peripheral vision as I went.

My heart was pounding in my chest. I wanted to go back to the two of them, to throw my magic against the sorcerer, free Ba. But that wouldn’t do any good for anyone. Whoever Dorela had been, she beyond my help.

That was ignoring the fact that I probably wouldn’t even be able to touch the sorcerer. She was older, she’d been accumulating for longer, she’s spent more time learn tricks, secrets, and aspects.

I’d never have the power to stop any of them. Even if one day I became a Reeve myself, I’d be setting myself against an entire school of them. There had to be a hundred or more Reeves in Antorxian service across the nations, not counting the academy Masters, who were all each somehow more than a Reeve themselves.

I was never going to stop them through power. I was never going to be able to change anything through power. That was their philosophy’s solution to everything, and I’d never beat it with its own strength.

I just didn’t know what the answer could be. Subterfuge? Sabotage? I could try those, though I doubted I’d be the first.

Right now I didn’t even have the strength or resources to get away from the academy.

I found the shelves I was looking for and tried to stamp down on my growing anger.

I started flipping through the books. Each book only contained at most four or five designs, but there were still more cantograms at my fingertips than I’d ever seen before.

I found a cantogram that would burn maja to create light, at the cost of causing a kind of wasting sickness from long-term exposure.

There was a cantogram for perfect night vision, which only worked if it was tattooed onto the eyeball, and would cause slow blindness after that.

There was one called the Night’s Welcome Canto, which would amplify any light passing through it without causing any kind of debilitating condition at all. That was one worth memorizing.

By the time my candle burned down I’d memorized the layout of three more cantograms. Night’s Welcome for a potential way to see in the dark, Stone’s Quickness to lighten a weapon — assuming I ever worked out a way to engrave my sword — and Sky’s Appetite, a foundational cantogram that could absorb maja and not much else.

Those were just the start of what I had access to, and with my inks I had a way to use them. My limited repertoire of aspects wouldn’t limit me any more. Even my decimated maja stores wouldn’t hold me back for long.

Antonyx’s library reforms had democratized a lot of the knowledge held down here. It was no longer gated behind hidden volumes that could only be found with long trial and error searching. Now all it would take was dedicated study, and I was no stranger to study.

Beyond what I could do was what I needed to do. Two weeks ago, I would have been happy to survive. Survival was all I wanted. Now I had a new perspective. Survival wasn’t the only goal I had in mind. It wasn’t even the top of my list.

The image of Ba came back to me as I looked down the copy of the index Antonyx had given me.

Under gentling only one shelf was listed, but I was sure that I could at least learn what it was, how it was done, and maybe even how it could be stopped.