My vision came back to me all at once, and I rolled over, looking for that dumpy prick who had handed me my ass so easily. There he was, maybe a short stone’s throw away, pulling his face out of the dirt, his insufferable smile long gone. He had bloody holes all over the back of his tunic. Ah, it’s over, then. That last punch to the head had either broken my neck or knocked something loose in my head, and I’d died without even knowing it.

Shame prickled inside of me. I’d lost, and that red-tunicked ass was the one that had done it. He wasn’t even a good fighter. I’d taken him down once back in his Crim days – Koffer he was called – and he’d refused to fight me again. And now he was as much better than me than I had been better than him. I have to get a mantle of my own. I need to make my decision about which Order to join faster than I thought.

A strange whirring noise sounded overhead, and I looked up to see the Artisan Elder floating near the peak above on her contraption of metal. If I’d had one of those, I’d have won easily, mantle or no. It was a useless thought, but it salved my stinging pride.

She was poking at Sett, who was hanging from the precipice with his fist wrapped around a sword, Tamra’s I thought. I’d have loved to have known how he ended up with that, but it was a question for later. He was blinking in confusion as if he’d just woken. Had he died there and still managed to keep his fist clenched somehow?

“Last man standing can be something of a technicality, it turns out,” she cackled, poking him again. “Get your feet under you, boy, you just won.”

My mouth dropped open. Sett won? He was tough and he had the determination of an ox, but he won? From the look on his face as he scrambled the rest of the way up the peak, he was thinking the same thing.

“Attention, all of you!” the Artisan Elder cried, a spray of sparks appearing in the smoke that billowed behind her head. “Sett here was the last one to draw breath out of those who strove for the peak and the highest on the hill, so we declare him the winner of your first Melee! It may not have been the most impressive victory I’ve ever seen, but let that be a lesson: sometimes even as you lay dying you can still achieve victory, and a win doesn’t have to be pretty so long as your enemy is the one who stops breathing first. And, if I’m being honest, there was something beautiful in watching him cling to life even when all seemed lost. Let’s have a little more of that from everyone next time.”

She took Sett’s hand in her own, raising it in victory, and the Acolytes in the stands stamped their feet and cheered. After a moment, I put my own hands together and joined them. It might not have been how I’d wished my first Melee would turn out, but Sett was a good man, and I was glad to see him succeed.

“And as a prize to the victor,” the Elder continued, “I present this treasure.” She held a heavy iron ring up in the air. It was ugly and crudely hewn, but there was something compelling about it. “This ring allows its wearer to learn faster and recover quicker. If you’re able to keep this, Sett, you’ll earn your new masteries in half the time you would otherwise.”

Sett took the item reverently and slid it onto his finger. I felt a wild pang of jealousy and let it bubble in me for a long moment before pushing it away. If anyone needed that ring, it was me, the boy with no mantle and no mastery. If you wanted it, you should have won. That’s how these things work.

“Now,” the Artisan Elder said, her arm sweeping around the room to include us all. “The Mess Hall awaits you! Go refresh yourselves and discuss what you should have done differently here. May the Aspects guide you.”

Chatter and conversation filled the air, and I picked myself up from the ground, dusting off my torn gray clothes. More and more my lack of color was feeling like a mark of shame.

Koffer slunk away without a word. I was tempted to yell some jibe or insult after him – not so tough after all, hey Kof? – but I checked the impulse. We’d be killing and maiming each other time and again in the months to come, but at some point we’d need to fight together. Keeping a grudge felt like a bad idea.

I had the opportunity to put that wisdom into action sooner that I’d have wished as Sett came running over after descending the peak. His glowing smile faltered when he saw me, but he approached without hesitation.

“What happened?” he asked. “I saw Koffer put you down, but it didn’t look so bad. I thought if I took his attention elsewhere you might get up and keep going.”

“No such luck,” I said, forcing a light tone. “He must have caught my neck at a bad angle. But who cares about that? You won! Congratulations!”

His smile came back even wider, and I was glad I hadn’t made a fuss of it. Sett was the best of us. “I thought I’d lost,” he confessed. “I was just hanging on as long as I could. It was as much not wanting to fall as it was wanting to win.” He held up the ring. “Can you believe it? This is going to be so useful.”

“Incredible,” I said as we took one of the gentler slopes down to the floor below. “You’ll put it to good use, I’m sure.”

He looked shocked. “No, no,” he said. “Well, I mean…yes, but not just me. We’re going to share it.”

I gaped at him. “You’re going to share your first place prize?”

He cast me a sidelong glance as if he wasn’t sure if I was joking. “We all need to advance, Maphen,” he said. “I’ll let all my Warrior kin take turns. You too, if they let me.”

I shook my head and clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re too good for this world, friend,” I told him. I couldn’t quite believe he was being serious, but at the same time, it was the most obvious thing for Sett to have done. “I’ll take you up on that.”

We went over the match step by step as we descended, but when we hit the bottom, still deep in discussion, someone stood in my way and didn’t move. I looked up and saw a tall, thin man with a fringe of long, messy gray hair and a bald pate up top. My stomach lurched and my body contracted as if I had a stick through my chest again. I knew that face as well as my own, and for all that I’d known this was coming, I’d hoped I had more time.

“Hi, Dad,” I said lightly, throwing my arm over Sett’s shoulder as insolently as I knew how. “Did you watch me die?”

* * *

“Unacceptable!” he shouted, pacing the room. It was his favorite word, and he’d used it no fewer than eight times since we reached the Summoner Elder’s office. “He is my son. I will not have him participating in this idiocy!”

I noticed that his theatrical parade about the room never took him too close to the Elder’s demon familiar squatting in the corner. The creature would have stood more than three meters tall had it been upright, and its pale, crescent-shaped, eyeless head tracked every movement in the room. It appeared perfectly docile, but a hint of a growl behind its bellows breath made me wonder if it was feeling its master’s irritation. Either that, or it wanted to be let off its magical leash and rain down Sheol on us all.

“This idiocy is saving humanity, Gared,” the Elder said mildly. “Not to mention providing you with a very comfortable living for the past thirty years.”

My father raised his chin, looking pathetically weak standing off against a master of the Tower – she was nearly as tall sitting in her chair as he was on foot. Whatever glamour had prevented me from perceiving her face or even her gender beside the Scrying Pool was gone now, and I saw her as a statuesque woman of later years, with a pleasantly lined face and hair that was more gray than purple. She glowed brightly, and even more than that, she radiated a sense of power and wisdom that made me want to listen when she spoke. Her demon aura was billowing black and red behind her, and I sensed that it was responding to her emotions. She might look to be in perfect control, but she was not happy.

“Oh yes, thirty years of cleaning up the blood and shit of my betters,” Father said scathingly. “Seven Aspects forbid I go and live my life like a normal person; I went through your damnable Entry Test, so now I have to grub after you forever.” Every time he looked at me, his nostrils flared. As ever when I saw him, my first thought was that I was grateful I resembled my long-lost mother instead of him.

“If you are displeased with your duties here, other options exist,” the Elder said with quiet menace.

Father sneered and shook a finger at her. “By all means, go ahead and send me up the Tower on my own – see how you fare. Do you know where the towels are? The mops? How much to charge for a sack of grain? How to write a promissory note?”

She frowned, looking impossibly wise and disappointed with Father’s stupidity. I was inclined to agree. “Others can be found for such tasks.”

“Others have been found for those tasks, Semira,” he shot back. “Who do you think hired them? Who do you think trained them? Who do you think manages every last detail of your existence without you bothering to even notice? Me! And all I asked,” he seethed, flinging a finger in my direction, “was for my boy to be left out of it.”

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“He was left out of it,” the Elder said, steepling her fingers and giving me a considering look. “He snuck in of his own accord.”

I bit my lip to keep from reacting. I’d really hoped that little detail might not come up. Father stopped in his tracks, a dull red flushing up onto his bald head. It was never a good sign when that happened. “How could you?” he asked me, aghast. “What’s wrong with you?”

“You were never going to let me if I asked,” I said, shrugging. “What choice did I have?”

The Elder held up a hand with the smallest of head shakes, and I clamped my lips shut. She was right, of course: the last thing my father ever wanted to hear mid-rant was my voice. Or good reason.

“Throw him out,” my father said decisively. “Purge his name from the rolls. It’s the only option I’ll allow.”

I was on my feet in a flash, a protest on my lips, but a steely look from the Summoner Elder quelled me. I balled my fists and dropped my gaze. I’ll be damned to the deepest demon pit in Sheol before I leave this Tower.

“To use the phrase you are so fond of,” she said to my father, “that is unacceptable. You saw how he performed today. I’ll not lose a promising Neophyte and future asset in the War Above because my steward is in a snit.”

“I am not your steward,” he hissed. “I am the Master of Facilities, and you know it.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “You are the Master of latrines and linens, and you think because you’ve managed to shirk your duty to the Seven Aspects that your son would like to do the same. It’s nice to see there’s some steel somewhere in your lines. I’d never have guessed it.”

Father drew himself up, rail-thin and austere in his gray robes. “You go too far, Semira. I am an essential part of the functioning of this school, and if you deny me the only thing I have ever asked of the faculty, you will discover exactly how essential I am.”

“If you choose to leave your post, you will be forced to climb,” she reminded him.

“I don’t have to leave,” he said, folding his arms. “All I have to do is less. Can you recall what it was like here when you first rose to Deacon, when Happon held my post? How would you like to go back to that? Cold baths half the time and lumpy porridge for every breakfast?”

The Summoner Elder paused, grimacing. Apparently this was a dire threat. I stood stock still, heart beating hard, willing her to deny him. I would not leave the school. Being here in the Tower, for the first time since I was a child, I felt challenged. I had a purpose. Now my cowardly, clutching father wanted to wrench it from me like a toddler’s toy.

“I will not expel him,” she said slowly, her deep purple eyes falling first on me, then on my father, then back on me. “Such a thing has never been done, and it will not begin now. However,” she said, rolling right over the top as Father began to protest, “the boy has not completed his initiation by choosing an Order. Until he has, it could be argued that he is not yet enrolled.”

“Warrior,” I blurted. “I choose Warrior.” The sight of Aphos winning the Melee still lingered in my mind, and if being unpledged left me vulnerable to expulsion, my former principled neutrality meant less than nothing to me.

“That doesn’t count,” Father snapped.

The Elder gave me a heavy, disapproving look as if she’d heard my panicked thoughts. “It does not,” she agreed.

I cursed my hastiness. I should have chosen Summoner. I bet she’d have supported me.

“This is no longer a question of you simply choosing an Order,” she told me. “Legally, you are your father’s property until age eighteen, and enough of the Elders will be afraid of bad meals and lice in the bedsheets that they’d hand you back to him, precedent be damned. But we are training to fight the Everwar here, the only human task that actually matters in the end. I for one take that seriously. You will have to show incontrovertibly that you belong here if you wish to stay.”

“I do wish to stay,” I said immediately.

“Think of what you’re doing!” my father pled, crossing to me with hands clasped, bending down to look me in the eye. “They don’t care about you, boy. They kill you over and over in this insane Tower and then march you up past everything we know for some war they say the Aspects want us to fight, but they don’t actually know. I’ve spoken to the Prophet, you know that. She goes on and on about the Celestial Realm, but in reality, she knows no more of Sharell than I do.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” the Elder said quietly, catching my eye.

“It’s all made up,” my father insisted. “Nobody knows what’s at the top of the Tower. Is there a top of the Tower? Or does it just ascend forever, with level after level of death and trial waiting for these stupid, duped children? You don’t know, son, you can’t know. Maybe we made up the Seven Aspects because we want to be great and some crazy sod wrote the Precepts and called them holy.”

The huge demon in the corner gave a sudden, vicious growl and rocked forward on its front talons, leaning toward my father. He shrank back, and I have to admit I did the same. The Elder flicked her hand at the massive creature, and it clamped its fanged mouth shut, rocking back on its heels.

She looked every bit as livid as her familiar. In fact, it was probably her anger that roused the demon in the first place. “Naked blasphemy. You always find some new way to disappoint, Gared.”

Shaking off his fright, my father turned back to me. “Believe them or don’t, but you mustn’t stay,” he said, shaking my arm. “Go home. Live as long as these monsters will let you. Find a wife, make babies, do something you love. Please.” His eyes were actually focused on me for the first time in I didn’t know how long. They were pale blue, washed-out and tired just like the rest of him.

“Father…” I struggled to find the right words. He was actually seeing me for once, and I wanted him to hear me, too. “That’s the most you’ve said to me at one time in I can’t remember how long. If you’d said it years ago, I’d have listened. But I have found something I love, and you didn’t notice. I’m strong, I’m fast, and I’m smart. I was offered entrance to four Orders. This is what I’m good at, and I want to stay.” I turned to the Elder. “Please, let me stay.”

Father’s face turned flat and ugly. “She admitted you belong to me, so what you want hardly matters.”

“That wasn’t what I said,” she said mildly, “but rather, the opposite. The boy has both talent and courage. He must be allowed to prove himself.”

“How?” I asked. My hands clasped of their own accord as if I were praying.

“Make it so obvious you belong that no one can deny you,” she said, favoring me with a small smile. “If every Hierophant from all seven Orders agrees that you belong, then you will be allowed to pledge yourself to an Order and progress.”

Once again I bitterly cursed myself for not picking an Order at first like everyone else. I’d have been immune to Father’s little tantrum if I’d just kept my head down and done the obvious thing. If only I’d been a little less sure I was different than the other kids; that I was better than them.

“I will be speaking with the other Hierophants individually,” my father promised. “They will not be inclined to allow this.”

“You might be surprised, Gared,” she replied cooly. “Not everyone is so cynical and faithless as you seem to believe.”

“What do I have to do to prove myself?” I asked, trying to keep my composure. I resolved that, no matter the answer, I would achieve it. Fight all the Devouts in the Melee? I would do it. Walk into Sheol to pinch a demon’s bottom? Consider it done. Anything it takes.

“If, despite your lack of both mantle and mastery, you are able to perform well in the next Melee, after the other Neophytes have had a time to train, no one could reasonably say you should leave,” she said.

“He has to win,” my father interjected.

“One of the last five standing,” she countered. “You never ran in the Melee, Gared. You don’t know how much luck a win takes.”

He stewed and grumbled as he thought it over, looking for loopholes. “No unfair assistance,” he said. “It has to be all on his own.”

“He already lacks all the gifts the other students possess,” the Elder said. “What more can we deny him?”

“Friends. Comfort. All the things you’re going to take away from him in the end anyway,” Father said, a deep well of anger bubbling up in his words.

The Elder rolled her glorious eyes. “Very well. If it will put an end to the conversation, I will revoke his access to the Summoner dormitory until this is resolved.”

“Where will I sleep?” I objected.

“There are plenty of empty classrooms,” my father said with an unpleasant smile. “Hard floors won’t deter you, will they, son? I thought you really wanted this.”

The Elder looked at me directly, the weight of her authority and personality settling over my shoulders like a blanket. “That is indeed what you will need to do. You can still eat in the Mess and attend any classes your candidate Orders hold, but beyond that no one will offer you aid. Please know, though, that I am hoping you will succeed. I may not have approved of your initial indecision, but I suddenly find myself very interested in you overcoming the odds.”

“I am satisfied,” my father announced. “I agree to the terms.” He held out his hand.

She reached out and shook it, her own hand dwarfing his. “If he succeeds, Gared, I never want to hear another word from you about this.”

“I will succeed,” I told them.

Father turned to me, shaking his head in disappointment. “I know you don’t see it now, boy, but I’m doing this for your own good.”

Heat flashed through me, and I couldn’t keep it out of my voice. “You’re doing it for your own good, Father. And you’d best hope I do succeed, because if I have to go back to your home, one of us won’t end up living very long.”

With that, I bowed to the Summoner Elder and marched out of the room, my back straight and head high. Show no weakness. Show him you belong.

And even if he doesn’t believe it, win so hard and so thoroughly that he has no choice but to accept it.