Since she’d harvested plenty of Ascendent blood from Admiral Strangford, Faith set about patching her soul again – with Andrel’s help. A couple days after the murder, a note arrived at the Kinclaith abode instructing the boy to present himself in Six Towers for his next lesson. Irimina’s lady’s maid alerted me at once, something I rewarded generously, and thus I was ready when Faith donned her serious-Whisper-teacher-and-imposing-witch attire (which consisted of a black, only-slightly-ruffled dress that actually extended down to her ankles). I tailed her out to her favorite abandoned mansion and took up my usual post outside the ballroom window.
This time, Polonia didn’t try to talk her little brother out of this folly, although she did walk him all the way to the front door before storming home in a foul mood. (By now, all of Irimina’s staff knew better than to talk to the sixteen-year-old when her face scrunched up in one particular way.) Meanwhile, Andrel entered the mansion with a great deal more confidence than he had the first time.
That was about to change.
Faith, as I’d already seen from her interactions with her pupils at Strathmill House, believed in the firehose philosophy of teaching. So as soon as Andrel walked into the ballroom, she threw a bottle at him.
He started but caught it.
“Student,” she intoned. “Tell me what this is.” Without another word, she regarded him sternly.
Hesitantly, he attuned at the dark red liquid inside the bottle. “I’ve – never seen anything – quite like it,” he said, puzzled. “It’s – certainly electroplasmically active.” He tapped the glass, frowning and trying to recall what his textbook had said about electroplasmically-active body fluids. “But it doesn’t seem to be like a ghost. Or – it’s not spirit essence, I don’t think…. I’ve read about it, but I don’t think it should be this dark….” Holding up the bottle, he let starlight filter through the liquid.
“Don’t look at it,” Faith ordered. “Feel it. What do you feel?”
He stared at it anyway while attuning again. “It’s…like what I’ve read leviathan blood is like, but…thinner. It’s not quite that. It’s….” Shaking his head, he admitted defeat, “I’m sorry, Miss Karstas, I don’t know what it is.”
She bestowed rare praise on him anyway. “That’s a good start,” she pronounced, and gave him a broad smile that didn’t touch her eyes. “You may become a passable Whisper after all.” Then she revealed the correct answer: “It’s demon blood, emulsified with Tycherosian souls.”
Andrel’s eyes widened, and he held up the bottle and attuned intently again, committing that specific arcane feeling to memory.
Faith waited for him to finish, then announced, “Today we’re going to perform a ritual. You’ve memorized all the wards in Boden’s Primer, right?”
He blinked. “I – I think so, Miss Karstas?”
“Good. Let’s start with drawing them.”
Reaching into her satchel, she produced out a paintbrush, flipped it at him, and stabbed a finger at the floorboards. Although Andrel waited for paint, Faith only crossed her arms and stared at him.
The boy’s eyes went even rounder when he realized what he was supposed to use, but he knelt obediently, uncorked the bottle, and dipped the brush into it. Withdrawing it quickly, as if expecting it to leap out of his hand and strangle him, he goggled at the way the blood coated the bristles. Then he dabbed the thick liquid onto the floor. When it only glistened quietly in the starlight, he gained courage and started to trace out one of the wards. Faith stood over him, criticizing the thinness of the lines and the tightness of some of the curls. Once she was satisfied that he’d overcome his fear of demon blood, she pulled out a second brush and began to paint the other, symmetric half of the ward so he could copy it when he was unsure.
“The rest of the ritual is mine to perform,” she told him when he finished, “but Six Towers is a dangerous place, so stand guard.”
And she tossed her lightning hook at him without bothering to check if he caught it, stepped into the center of the ward, and sank into what appeared to be a complete meditative trance. Suspiciously fast, in my opinion, a couple feral ghosts drifted into the ballroom and hovered just in front of Andrel. And sure enough, inside the ward, Faith’s eyes opened just a slit to monitor her pupil’s reaction.
Poor Andrel looked absolutely petrified. There he was, trapped in a house in Six Towers with a ritual ward painted in demon blood on the floor behind him, ravenous ghosts in front of him, his mentor sitting cross legged in the center of aforementioned ward and lost to the world for all he could tell – and all he had to defend the two of them was a lightning hook that he barely knew how to use.
Faith waited and watched, curious.
The ghosts floated an inch or two closer, testing whether their prey possessed the necessary strength of will.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
General Helker’s lessons on discipline held. Although his hands trembled a little, her son switched on the lightning hook, raised it like a spear, planted himself between Faith and the ghosts, and made sure that absolutely nothing got past him to attack his “defenseless” mentor.
Satisfied by his performance, which was “reasonably good for a thirteen-year-old who didn’t know what he was doing,” as she later told a beaming Irimina, Faith proceeded to mend her tattered soul. Unfortunately, the process consumed all of the blood she’d harvested from Admiral Strangford.
(“Does it have to be Ascendent blood?” I’d already asked Ash. “Couldn’t we just have stolen some leviathan blood?”
He didn’t fully understand Faith’s ritual either, but he hypothesized, “It probably needs special processing, so by harvesting it directly from an Ascendent, she can skip a lot of the necessary steps and supplies. Also, I think the demon has to be consumed during the ritual, so latent leviathan blood wouldn’t work. And anyway, by the time leviathan blood gets to Doskvol, it’s been heavily processed to work as fuel.”
Which meant that we’d have to get her more, and soon, lest she lose any more of her humanity.)
Meanwhile, so intent was Andrel on fending off Faith’s ghosts that he didn’t even notice when she finished her ritual. Opening her eyes, she smiled and crooked a finger at a large specter that hovered just outside the doorway.
It attacked.
Andrel waved the lightning hook desperately, but instead of shooting out an arc of electroplasmic energy, it threw off a handful of weak sparks and sputtered out. While he was frantically trying to restart it, the specter latched onto him and began to leach off his life essence.
As its glowing blue form sank into his skin, Faith rose and called, “Pass me the lightning hook!”
With the last of his will, Andrel extended it towards her, mutely pleading for help.
She reignited it and made a show of holding off the specter while she imparted some words of wisdom: “This is what it feels like to have your life essence drained. Here’s the lesson: Don’t be afraid to lose sometimes. Be much more afraid of me and my prowess with my lightning hook.”
For emphasis, she thumped the butt of the lightning hook on the floor. Then, with a casual wave, she banished the specter, which wept and wailed but swirled out the window and vanished down the street.
Although Andrel swayed in place, he didn’t collapse, winning him a look of approval from Faith.
“Come,” she ordered. “I’ll walk you home.”
She had to match her pace to his, but she made up for it by lecturing him on how to cope with essence draining the entire way back to Brightstone. By the time she dropped him off, he was staggering and glassy-eyed and about as coherent as a feral ghost. Irimina, who was grooming him to take over her smugglers crew one day, immediately recognized the symptoms. Accepting them as part and parcel of a Whisper’s life, she listened to Faith’s report on his progress, clucked over him, and sent him to bed early.
Polonia, on the other hand, clenched her jaw and her fists but said nothing.
Faith returned to the railcar murmuring to herself about gliding quietly through the ink-black waters, fueled by a burning need to get stronger and a lingering hatred for Setarra. As she entered the common room, she muttered something vague about fire and smoke and learning something really, really distressing. Since I was observing her from a dark corner, I caught her flash of disquiet when she realized that that last memory hadn’t come from either Strangford or his demon.
But then she noticed me, smeared a toothy grin across her face, and started rambling about demon blood and lemon and mint, and I got nothing more useful out of her.
----------------------------------------
The next day, Faith popped up at Strathmill House bright and early to teach her class on leadership skills. Dividing the children into groups, all of which just so happened to be led by the orphans on her shortlist for infiltrating the Church, she assigned them an extended project that dovetailed with Ash’s Slide lessons.
Not bothering to tone down the vocabulary, she announced, “I want you to select a person of some importance around the city, and build a dossier of their activities and hobbies. This can involve tailing them, or talking to their associates, or doing research in the library to learn what’s publicly known about them.” In a hint at her true intent, she warned, “While it may be easier to pick someone local, the more ambitious you are, the better. There will be special rewards and dispensation for those who do especially well.”
The orphans, as always, were eager to please. None of the groups picked a target in Crow’s Foot, although some chickened out and ventured only as far as Nightmarket. Others, however, went to Brightstone, where they practiced acting like nobles, and Charterhall, where they dodged Bluecoats and bureaucrats. Along the way, Faith meddled to get some of them caught so she could determine how they performed under pressure. Many, especially the younger ones, ran to her or Ash for help, but a significant number opted to deal with the obstacles themselves.
By the time the groups wrapped up their investigations and presented their findings to their classmates, I could tell that Faith’s attention was narrowing down to two children. Amusingly, one had shadowed a Mayvin, one of Lauretta’s (and Faith’s) distant cousins, all over Brightstone. The other had gone to Charterhall, tailed one of the city’s most prominent lawyers, and drawn up a comprehensive list of his clients – including names that he tried to keep confidential. The fact that Faith started taking notes (albeit from a slumped position) during their presentations suggested that I’d soon be delivering one of them to Mylera for fencing lessons.
----------------------------------------
With both my crewmates thus occupied by either obstructing or rescuing the children, I scoured the orphanage for General Helker’s battle plans. Even though Faith had converted one of the smaller rooms into a personal office, her papers were literally scattered all over Strathmill House. It was incredible. I kept finding more crumpled sheets of paper with her handwriting in all the classrooms (even classrooms she didn’t teach in), under the dining hall tables, and even next to the kitchen stove, balled up for use as kindling. It took forever, but eventually, based on what I recalled of Faith’s syllabus, I zeroed in on a stack of lecture notes that all seemed to have been written around the time that she wheedled the battle plans out of Polonia.
Unfortunately, before I could search through all of them, I got interrupted by Faith’s triumphant return from nearly getting a batch of orphans arrested for loitering. Still, I made a mental note of where the notes were and what they looked like, and resolved to return at my earliest convenience.
----------------------------------------