Death After Death PLUS 276-278

Ch. 276 - A New Home

It’s all part of the brainwashing, Simon reminded himself as he lay there pretending to sleep. It was hard to sleep on cold stone, but he eventually managed. Still, before the world faded to black, he lay there for at least an hour pondering his current predicament and second-guessing himself. 

Am I being too meek? He wondered. Should I have begged for something to eat or asked more questions? He wanted to behave like all the other kids, but he had nothing to compare himself to, even after spending weeks and weeks playing with children in an effort to remember what that was like.  

He didn’t even notice that he’d slipped off until the dull, brassy roar of a horn echoed through the complex, waking him immediately. Simon had spent years waking to the gentle chime of Hepollyon’s gong, but this was the opposite of that comforting sound. It was a discordant roar that was loud enough that he felt it through the stones he was lying on. 

He was up immediately, and after a look around as he struggled to remember where he was and what he was supposed to do, a light-skinned slave gestured and said, “you best hurry, boy, or there’ll be nothing to eat when you reach the top.”

That was when Simon remembered. He was supposed to go to the top of the pyramid and find his class. He thanked the man as he dashed out the door and started running across the plaza toward the giant step pyramid that dominated the area. 

He’d expected some step between waking up and class or whatever it was he was moving toward. That would have made sense, but then, it also would have made sense to put the lowest class at the bottom of the pyramid. He didn’t let these eccentricities annoy him, though. Instead, he tried to see the pattern in the strangeness and understand what it was telling him. 

Well, he would later, at least. More data and time would let him figure out what in the hell these assholes were trying to do, but he lacked the bandwidth to ponder larger questions once he started on the stairs. Even in a miraculously young body, running up the steps of a hundred-foot-tall step ziggurat wasn’t easy, and before he was halfway up, running and breathing were the only things he could focus on. 

No matter how tired he was, though, he was still able to take some pride in passing many of the other boys despite their seemingly earlier start. The black-robed boys were older and taller, so they ran faster than him, but he ignored them. He was only in competition with the other brown-robed boys and girls who ran just as quietly as he did up the stairs. They said nothing as he passed them; most didn’t even look at him as they were focused on their own struggle. 

As he wondered idly how many years people would have to run up and down the stairs, he noticed that the pyramid was made of sharp-edged basalt stones. While it was brightly painted with murals on each level, it was hard enough that the stairs showed little wear, though he wasn’t sure how long it had been standing here. 

Accounts differed in Zurari and tended to range between centuries and forever. Today, history wasn’t his concern, though. It was keeping his eyes open and mouth shut. 

When Simon reached the top floor, he was breathless and sweating, but he was apparently one of the first to arrive. He was handed a bread trencher filled with porridge by a woman in gray robes who seemed to be his new teacher. 

She didn’t seem much kinder than the minder who had tried to put the fear of God into him last night, but she did nod and say, “Punctual. Excellent. That will serve you well here.”

Simon considered thanking her, but it felt wrong, so he resisted the urge. Instead, he took his food and walked to the edge of the pyramid, not so far from the stairs, and gazed down at everything. First, he looked at the stairs and the students still struggling to come up them. Only the students in the brown robes came all the way to the top. The black-robed students only went halfway up, and the few Magi in colorful robes that were out and about this early stuck to the courtyard. They didn’t even come up to the first floor, which continued to strike Simon as exactly backward. 

Once his food was cool enough, he started to eat. It was an awkward exercise without a spoon, be he used pieces of his bowl and made due until there was nothing left of either of them. As he ate, he watched the other students arrive, and he noticed that the food they were given decreased in both quantity and quality. After a while, they were given only bread and eventually nothing at all.

Simon thought that was the worst it could get for them, but the last few got worse than nothing. Up until she’d carried a long slender pointer, which gave her as much an air of authority as her gray robes. However, it was only when she started to whip the latest boys with it like a switch that he understood why his classmates seemed to fear it. 

Simon thought that was an interesting twist, but the last thing he was going to have a chance to do was examine it. Instead, when the final student arrived, the teacher waited only a moment before calling the class to order. Simon expected to be forced to give some awkward introduction then, but that was skipped too. 

Instead, he sat down with everyone else in a wide semicircle that occupied most of the top floor of the pyramid. Unlike the exterior of the building, the interior was spartan and undecorated. The room had a large blackboard, and there was a large spiral staircase winding down into the darkness on one side of the room. That seemed to be the absolute center of the pyramid, but everyone else ignored it, so he did, too. 

When everyone was assembled, she led them in a prayer to the God-King of the world, which struck Simon as a little funny because he did not, in fact, rule over most of the world that Simon had experienced. Still, he kept that amusement from his face and did exactly what the young boy to his left did, down to the mouthing of the words and the hand motions. 

The whole thing had a rote feel about it, and only a few of his fellow students, or initiates or whatever it was they all were now really seemed to care about them. Simon cared even less than they did, but he did his best to fake it. Something about having to be at the front of the pack to get your breakfast made him think that it would probably be for the best if they considered him to be devoted as soon as possible. 

Even just standing there and doing the same things as everyone else earned him enough looks from the boys and girls around him that he was certain they recognized him as the new kid. The teacher said nothing, though. The most she did to acknowledge that he hadn’t been there yesterday was to hand him a slate and a piece of chalk after she started to discuss the lesson, which turned out to be learning to write.

Nothing could have been a bigger waste of time to Simon. He knew how to write in dozens of languages, but there was nothing he could do about it as he instructed everyone in the correct way to connect the letter to other letters in the flowing, cursive fashion that the Murani used, depending on what words were involved. 

Simon did as he was told, though he was careful not to make his lines too crisp or his forms too perfect. He was careful to be diligent and act as if he was devoting real effort to this, because their teacher often lashed children who became distracted at random.

Still, even as he did so, he tried to look for some hidden subtext. He thought that perhaps there was some mystical symbolism in the words that she chose and that there was a certain similarity of the shape to some of the words of power that he knew. 

Simon struggled with looking for a deeper meaning until he finally gave up around lunchtime. In the space of four hours, they hadn’t even managed to cover four letters. At that rate, it would take almost a week before they covered all thirty-one letters in the Murani alphabet. 

Simon despaired at that as gray-robed servants came up from the stairs and handed out pita bread stuffed with rice and grilled vegetables to everyone in attendance. The food was decent and filling, but the idea that he’d gone through all this and leaped through so many hoops to put himself in a remedial elementary school class hurt his soul. 

You’re supposed to be a street rat orphan, Simon chastised himself. Half the kids in this room are probably. Literacy is kind of a prerequisite to gaining magic, and most of these kids probably don’t have it. 

They were wise words, but they didn’t help as much as they should have. Though the plain brown robes that everyone wore hid people’s origins and social status, the way they talked revealed all that and more, and Simon learned a lot over lunch as people peppered him with questions. 

He gave out his name freely enough, but whenever possible, he tried to turn other people’s questions into questions of his own because just giving away information would mark him as a sap and a pushover. When one girl asked him which tribe he was from, he shrugged it off and said, “If I told you I was Tzullian or Byrall, would that get me to the good part faster?” 

Another boy followed up to ask if he was from a merchant family based on the clans he’d name-dropped, but Simon ignored that too and countered. “I thought I was here to learn magic and serve the God-King, not become a scribe!”

That made a few boys smirk, and at least one laughed out loud, though he stopped immediately as soon as he’d drawn the eyes of the teacher. 

“Magic is later,” another girl promised him. “Our ruler, in his infinite wisdom, put magic in words so that the peoples of other nations can never use it against us. So, first we must learn to read, then we will learn to read magic.”

Simon pretended to accept that explanation, even though he knew that magic was spoken and written in an entirely different language. If that was the explanation they gave to eager young children, at least it made sense, and he could accept that whatever stories he was being told were for an intended audience that he was only pretending to be. 

The break was short, but the day was long. Despite his fears that it would take forever to get through the alphabet, it looked like it was planned that way. Even though he couldn’t detect any traces of magic in it, he could see that it was a sort of rotating curriculum that covered the same topics over and over so that students could learn by repetition. That made a sort of sense, since the class was always filling with new students and losing those who graduated. Still, simple math told him that he was doomed to be here for weeks at least. 

There were nearly fifty students in brown robes. If two to three were being added to the class every week, and a similar amount were moving on to become acolytes, then that was still three to six months here learning things he already knew and pretending to suck at them. That was the worst part, he decided as he traced the fifth letter of the day. If this was detailed calligraphy practice, he would have embraced it. 

Fortunately, just as he was about to go insane, they were given free time to work on art for a while. Given how harsh everything had been up until this point, that surprised him until he remembered that artistic ability was one of the things that he’d been tested on in the selection.

Well, at least they’re trying to develop imagination as much as knowledge, he told himself as he wiped his slate clean with his sleeve and tried to decide what it was he could draw. This wasn’t what he’d expected, but he’d make his peace with it if he could learn the answer to some of the deeper mysteries in this world. 

Ch. 277 - Raised by Wolves

That evening, when they were finally allowed to leave, Simon followed the rest of the students to the pair of dorms where the neophytes slept. The black-robbed students had not reemerged from wherever they had disappeared to that morning inside the pyramid, which made the river of children flowing down the pyramid and into the dining hall near the foot of it a sea of brown and tan with only a speck of gray where a slave or a minder supervised the organized chaos.

The children were not as boisterous as he would have expected, but then they were not entirely muted either. They were rather serious for kids, but there was still shoving, teasing, and snickering whenever they thought they were far enough away from an authority figure to avoid a scolding. Simon did his best to blend in, but mostly, he was surveying the little city within a city that surrounded the giant step pyramid and trying to square a few circles. 

Where had the black-robed students gone? Why did this feel like religious daycare instead of the dog-eat-dog existence that the first minder had practically promised him? It didn’t make any sense to Simon, but for now, he didn’t make waves or ask any questions that might strike his fellow initiates as odd. He just did whatever they did and kept his eyes open. 

Dinner was waiting for them, and despite how chaotic everything was, it was his first real socialization since he’d gone down what was becoming this very strange rabbit hole. Unlike breakfast, every child got to eat, but the best foods were in short supply. Children were jostling for position at every stage of the process with little wooden bowls. 

Simon struggled with them, but only because it would have been strange not to. He didn’t care at all whether he got a honeyed pastry sweetened with dates or that his bowl was more chickpeas and root vegetables than it was meat. He was happy to eat and learn. 

"Must we truly labor over the same letters over and over again?" one complained. “We learned these already only weeks ago!”

"This endless cycle of initiation wearies the spirit." Another piped up, wrinkling his nose, "Couscous yet again? When will we earn the right to wear the black robes?" 

These quiet grumbles and hopeful pleas were interspersed with hurried mouthfuls of food and a constant barrage of questions. Many were directed at Simon, the newcomer. But he remained elusive in his responses. Instead, he found it much more interesting to listen to other people than to repeat his own fictional and ever-shifting backstory again. 

“Is it true that the children in black never come back?” Simon asked one of his more persistent questioners, repeating part of a rumor he’d heard mentioned only a few minutes before. “Some of them just disappear, right?”

“No way,” the slightly older boy laughed. “They just have longer days than us. They come out every night. They even bring out the ones that died.”

“Students die?” Simon asked. This time, his surprise wasn’t feigned. Intellectually, he kind of expected it, but the reality still stunned him. 

“Learning magic is hard,” the other boy said with a shrug. He acted like he didn’t care, but Simon could see fear and sadness flicker quickly across his face. “Some people just aren’t cut out for it. Not like me! I—”

“Don’t listen to him,” another dark-haired girl said. “The acolytes hardly ever die. He’s just trying to scare you. There’s no real danger to being an initiate or an acolyte.”

“How do you know?” Simon asked. 

“Because I’ve been here for weeks, and I’ve only seen one body,” she said confidently. The first boy countered that he’d been here for a whole month and he’d seen at least two. Apparently, when someone died, they placed the body in state on a bier in the courtyard before burning it. Simon quickly did the math and decided that probably meant something like 25 kids were dying every year in whatever they were doing down there.

Depending on exactly how big the class size was, and it was probably in the hundreds, given how quickly children were recruited and flowed through the initiate stage, that could be something like a 10% mortality rate. While the idea of killing one in ten kids was rough, the fact was that acolytes probably persisted in this program for years, so it might well be twenty or thirty percent. 

A chill went through Simon as he looked around the room and tried to imagine a third of all of these kids were just gone. Some of them had a special talent that he didn’t yet fully understand, and many of them had no doubt led lives hard enough that a few were monsters in the making. Still, the idea that one day, a couple of years from now, a huge proportion of them would just be dead hurt him enough that he kind of wanted to shut this whole shit show down tonight with the most powerful souls he had instead of infiltrating and learning from it. 

The truth was probably worse than that, though. Magi weren’t exactly common. There were hundreds, or maybe thousands, but certainly not tens of thousands in the city. If they artificially extended their life, then only a few would die every year from violence or mishap, so it wasn’t like a lot of kids from here would ever reach that point. 

Simon’s gaze drifted as he tried to do the math, but when some tough kid jostled him, it slipped away, and he was glad to let it. His mind hadn’t been going anywhere healthy. This whole place was a filter, a very dangerous one, at that. 

As strange and tumultuous as dinner had been after the dark robbed acolytes started to appear in the dining hall from their mysterious absence, the younger brown robbed students quickly began to vacate the large room through another door. It wasn’t hard to see why, by some unspoken rule, they were clearly a caste above the younger initiates, and anyone that found themselves too slow to vacate their spot had their bowl knocked aside or worse. Though they didn’t quite beat the younger students, the abuse became more physical than verbal at some point. 

I can see that the Magi are really trying to raise some fine, upstanding bullies here, Simon thought to himself as he abandoned his long, empty bowl and moved to join the rest of his classmates. 

Even that casual cruelty wasn’t what he noticed most, though. That was just how many of them there were. There had been dozens and dozens of brown-robed children in Simon's group, but there were hundreds of black-robed students pouring in, and it was evident that as large as the dining hall was, not all of them would even be able to fit in at once. 

So that’s it, he thought. This is just training wheels for true torment, just like writing and art are training wheels for true magic. Simon wasn’t so sure that teaching all of these kids powerful magic and poor impulse was a good combination, but if it was a recipe for a real bloodbath, then why were there so many children? Wouldn’t they have been an endangered species?

It was hard to say, but as he passed outside with one tide of children, he saw nothing worse than bruises on the other group. Whatever violence they were engaged in, it was non-lethal. While some of them looked malnourished, none were exceptionally well-muscled, so there wasn’t any sort of martial drilling going on in the depths of the pyramid. 

Still, as Simon walked toward the place he’d be sleeping for the foreseeable future, he wondered what it was they did down there all day. They were up at dawn, just like him, and then they weren’t let back out until after dark. They were practically denied the sun. 

You’ll find out, Simon reminded himself. When the time comes, you won't have a choice. 

That night, when Simon went to go look for a bed, he found another surprise. While the black-robed children had graduated to full-time bullies, many of the brown-robed kids were already bullies in training. The boys and girls separated when they reached the place where they slept. Both groups were chaperoned by gray-robed minders until they went into austere halls with bunk beds for close to a hundred people, which was far more than they needed. He found that the hard way when he asked someone which bed in the long bunk house was free. 

“New kids sleep on the floor!” the dark-eyed kid said with a laugh. 

For a moment, Simon chose to believe he was joking, but as the beds started to be claimed, one at a time, starting with those that were closest to the door, it seemed more and more likely that he wasn’t. Top bunks were more in demand, so Simon decided to take one of the unclaimed bottom bunks midway down the hall, but the boy he’d asked about a bed only a moment before stepped forward and repeated himself. “New kids are on the floor, just like last night, and every night until another new kid comes to replace you.” As the young man spoke, he pointed to one of the back corners of the long room. “The longer you’re here, the closer you can sleep to the door. Those are the rules.”

Everything is a pecking order, huh? He thought with a sigh. This was enough to make him wish he’d just gone with tagging the walls of the city with magic words and letting them tear themselves apart. 

“The rules, huh?” Simon smiled coldly. “Whose rules? The minders? The teachers.”

“Who cares who made the rule,” the bully yelled, trying and failing to push Simon as he twisted his chest and stepped back half a step to avoid the other boy’s touch. “Everyone else did it, so you gotta do it too.”

“I slept on a floor last night because a Magi told me to,” Simon shot back, “But that floor had a fire, so unless you’re ready to cast a—

“New kids don’t deserve fire!” someone shouted from the growing crowd. 

“Warmth is for those who’ve been here the longest!” another echoed. 

Simon ignored those outbursts, and the smug look that the other boy gave him at that show of support, and continued. “So, unless you’re ready to show off your magic for all of us, I don’t think I have to listen to what you have to say.”

The boy’s face reddened with embarrassment as much as anger, and there was a collective gasp from the nearby boys as a wide ring began to form around the two of them. Simon really didn’t want to fight a kid, even if he was a kid himself, but the last thing he wanted to do was show weakness. He’d only been here a day, and he could already see what a bad idea that would be. 

Still, he waited for the other kid to throw the first punch and the second since the first was so half-hearted. “You’d really rather fight me than let me sleep in a bed no one is using?” Simon asked after he slipped the second punch and pushed the kid back, almost off of his feet. 

“You’re the one that’s making this harder than this has to be,” the boy said as one of his friends moved to join him, turning the thing into a two-on-one affair. “You’re going to end up in that corner one way or another!”

Simon had just enough time to wonder if these two were some of the most senior students or the most junior before they rushed him together. That was a question worth answering, but it would have to wait. 

While he didn’t want to hurt anyone, watching two boys team up against him like this made him feel slightly less bad about it. This time, he wasn’t quite so passive. He didn’t try to dodge again, which was what they were expecting. Instead, he moved forward close enough that the second boy’s fist didn’t have a chance to get any force behind it. He took that feeble punch in the chest as he delivered one to the other boy’s stomach. His blow was hard enough to double the other boy over.

Then Simon took a step back and let the first asshole come at him again before Simon pushed him over his friend, forcing them both to fall to the ground in a tangle of limbs. He might not be any stronger than these other boys, but he had lifetimes of fighting that they didn’t, and he felt certain he could take any group of two or three in the whole room, save for perhaps the biggest and oldest, who seemed content to watch. 

As Simon moved to the two kids on the ground, everyone seemed content to watch. That surprised him. He’d expected to have to make at least one or two more examples, but this seemed to be all there was that qualified for entertainment in the room, and no one wanted to miss a thing, which left Simon in the awkward position of how to finish this. He was unwilling to beat these two bloody, but it was clear that he couldn’t leave things unfinished, either. 

So, he decided to try threatening before brutal. As the second kid was getting up, Simon pushed him out of the way and advanced on his friend like he was going to deliver a bicycle kick to the ribs. He stopped at the last second, but the way that his would-be bully balled up to protect himself against a blow that never landed still provoked gales of laughter. 

While everyone was being so loud, Simon crouched down and spoke only loud enough that the boy on the ground could hear him. “If you tried that shit on my street, I wouldn’t stop beating you until you’d never walk again, do you hear me?” Simon snarled. “God thing for you, we aren’t on my street, and I promised the Magi I’d try to be on my best behavior.”

“Y-you did?” the boy asked, trying and failing to meet Simon’s gaze without flinching. 

“I did,” Simon agreed, “But you cross me again, and I’ll push you all the way down the stairs of the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles. I swear on the God-King I will. I’ll do it, and I’ll tell everyone it was an accident.”

That left the other boy pale, and when Simon offered him his hand to help him to his feet, he didn’t even register it at first. 

Ch. 278  - Raised by Wolves (Part 2)

That night, Simon slept on a top bunk further back in the room instead of the bottom bunk he’d originally planned. They weren’t any warmer in that drafty stone room, but he understood why they were in higher demand now. They were more defensible. 

Despite that advantage, though, he still got very little sleep. It wasn’t winter’s chill, or his thin blanket that kept him up, either. 

His fight, brief as it was, had left him paranoid enough that he woke up almost anytime someone snored too loud near him or got up to use the bathroom. While he didn’t expect his wanna-be bully to try anything again any time soon, he was certain he’d painted a target on his back with at least a few others. 

None of those feelings went away in the morning. Instead, when his internal clock finally said it was almost time, and he could see the thinnest light painting the sky through a high window, he roused himself before the sun could finish rising, dressed in the dark, grabbed his little slate, and quietly paced out of the slumbering hall before the horn blew.

As he walked through the darkened room, one of the other boys who was sleeping near the door surprised him by saying, “First, you want to show everyone how tough you are, and now you want to be first, huh? I don’t see this whole magic thing working out for you.”

Simon wanted to ask what the boy meant by that. It was obviously a threat, but was it a threat coming from him or from the adults? Would the teacher, or even perhaps the Magi, hammer him down if he stood out too far?

“Listen, you can be first if you want,” Simon answered with a shrug. “I don’t care if I’m tenth or even fiftieth. I just don’t want to run up those stairs again.” 

That drew some drowsy snickers out of some of the other boys, but no one tried to argue with him or stop him, so he kept going. Unfortunately, when he reached the door and tried to open it, he found it locked from the outside. That made him shake his head and his own stupidity. He should have realized it wouldn’t be that easy. Running is the whole point, he chided himself. 

The dull sound of the door rattling against the door provoked a second wave of laughter. They’d been expecting that. “Not so smart now, are you,” the first boy said, a little louder this time. 

Simon endured their quiet derision and took a silent step back from the door while he waited. Whether he was waiting for the door to open or for someone to jump him, he couldn’t say precisely. Fortunately, the former happened before the latter. A few moments before the horn rumbled through the dark to let everyone know a new day had arrived, there was the sound of the bar being removed. As that happened, the boys in the nearest bunk started to get up, and before the door had even opened, they were crowding close to Simon. 

When the door opened, it was like a wave, and despite what he’d said before, he was running just like the rest of them. He charged ahead with the other leaders of the pack in a desperate race that left the door to the girls’ sleeping hall before they’d even emerged. They were halfway across the plaza before that ugly horn even started spewing its dull, brassy notes throughout the Plaza of Lesser Miracles. 

At first, he was running just to keep from being trampled by the boys behind him, but soon enough, as the crowd thinned out and there were only half a dozen people anywhere near him, he started to get into it. This wasn’t quite play, but it was still more fun than swimming through the awful mix of hot and cold water that he had to do every morning at Hepollyon, so he ignored the way his breath steamed in the cold air as he pushed himself harder. 

As they crossed the courtyard, a wave of black-robed boys finally met and overtook them. Though they’d been in here longer and were no doubt in better shape, some of them were running fast enough that he was fairly certain they were using magic to make the dash that much faster. The idea of spending even a week of your life to run a bit faster struck him as pointless, but then he had no idea what the rewards and punishments were.

They probably don’t even have to bear the costs themselves, he told himself as an afterthought as he kept charging forward. This was something he’d considered before, but learning magic in any sort of organized, academic way would require the students to be able to shift the costs of spellcasting onto someone else, lest they all graduate as old men. That was certainly a big part of what was going on in the heart of the pyramid, and though he was sure it involved blood magic or worse, he still wanted to know what it was. 

Simon enjoyed the competitiveness of running across the plaza, but that enjoyment stopped the moment he got to the stairs. After that, he took back everything mean he’d told himself about Hepollyon; the water was only miserable for a minute or two, but the stairs were miserable all the way up. 

Still, he didn’t want to outright give up now, and he charged on as the half a dozen around him dwindled to only three. He didn’t even know that one of them was the boy that had given him the hard time until one of them gasped. “I thought you weren’t going to run!”

“And I thought I was going to be allowed to walk!” Simon yelled back, his voice full of mirth. “How could I have been so stupid, right?”

The other boy laughed at that. Simon didn’t come in first place, but he was close. He was in the top five, and that was enough for him. He had no wish to climb any higher than that. Still, he was rewarded with a double portion of fried eggs wrapped in a gooey cheese-filled wrap that was as messy as it was delicious. 

Simon moved to sit down on the edge of the pyramid where he had yesterday, but when he recalled the threat he’d made the night before, he opted to sit a little further back, against one of the pillars at the entrance. His spot still afforded him a beautiful view of Zurari and the God-King’s pyramid, as well as the rest of the acolytes and initiates that were running up it. 

Though Simon had intended to sit alone and make sure no one tried to jump him, he was very quickly joined by others. First, it was the guy who’d called him out on the stairs, and after that, a few other hangers-on made their presence known. Simon’s new rival, or whatever he was, introduced himself as Aljeem while they ate, and he seemed friendly enough. Truthfully, it seemed sincere enough that Simon didn’t even think it was an act. 

“You ran like the wind!” he said with a smile between loud bites of breakfast. “Truthfully, I didn’t think I’d be able to beat you at the end there.”

“In a few weeks, you won’t,” Simon agreed. They both laughed at that. 

“It’s true,” Aljeem admitted. “I’ve been doing this for months now, and practice does help, but with any luck, I’ll be gone before your legs get strong enough to pass me.”

The two of them ate and talked, and Simon found out that he was one of the most senior boys in his class, which meant that he’d soon don the black robes and disappear into the heart of the pyramid. That would probably put a damper on making friends with the kid, but Simon tried anyway.

After all, in a month or two, I’ll be heading that way myself, he thought as they chatted. 

Some of the boys were still definitely sour toward him, but a few of the most senior seemed to take a liking to him, and that helped to deflect a lot of hate he’d expected. Just after the prayer to the God-King that seemed to be a part of every lesson, Simon caught the boy he’d put down glaring at him. He never got his name, but that look made it clear that Simon had made an enemy for life and probably a few bonus enemies just for good measure. 

Simon ignored all of that. No one did anything untoward in the presence of the teacher. They didn’t dare because it was impossible to say what would set her off. She might overlook one or two troublemakers only to thrash the third hard enough to make them beg for mercy. It was capricious, and Simon spent the day keeping his hands busy and his mouth closed. 

One of the girls had forgotten her slate in her bunk, so the teacher had made her spend the rest of the day running up and down the steps as punishment. Simon would have preferred the lash to that and made a note never to make that same mistake. 

Still, aside from those activities, the day was remarkably boring. He practiced another five letters until he wanted to kill himself and listened to half a dozen lectures that seemed to all have the same moral: unswerving loyalty to the God-King. It was stultifying. It was like someone took all of the Greek Fables that every child his age had drilled into their head from an early age and rewrote them so that the moral was ‘the President is always right!’

Can’t reach the sour grapes? It’s because you didn’t believe in the God-King. Hare lost a race with the tortoise? It was cursed with slowness for its impious behavior toward the God-King. 

It was all so transparent to Simon. He’d often thought of the Oracle’s compound as a cult, and on some level, it probably was, but it was nothing like this. There was no brainwashing, just earnest entireties to see the world differently. This was the opposite. There was only one way to see the world, and that was with the God-King at the center of it. Their teacher was quick to badmouth other peoples and other cultures whenever they came up in one of her lessons. The pale-skinned savages of the south were often portrayed as villains in the fables she told; sometimes, they were even in league with the goblins and other monstrous races.

She wasn’t too kind to the Murani that dwelled beyond the city, either. She called the horse clans backward savages and, at one point, declared that “One does not need horse archers or cavalry charges in an age of magic. All anyone needs is faith in our lord’s power.”

While Simon doubted that most of the citizens of the city, let alone the country, would agree with that, they had no way of knowing that they were being ruled by a sinister priesthood. Simon spent much of the afternoon trying to figure out how he might get that word out, but without the advent of the printing press, he really had no idea. 

When class ended, he walked down the pyramid with his new friend, but Simon had no greater understanding of magic than he’d started with and no real idea of how he was going to put a crack in this country’s warlike ways before they got around to attacking Blackwater and Ionia again.