Chapter One

 

Aranthur blew on his fingers and cleaned his quill on a scrap of linen. He was too tired to do his best work, and he took a deep breath while he looked through the small glass-paned window in his gable. The glass window was the single greatest attraction in the long room that he shared with three other young men. They each had a gable with horn panes, seven storeys above the cobbled street, which allowed only a fraction of the winter sun to enter. Only the desk window had glass where a student could see to work.

His eye was caught by the sparkle of his talisman, a kuria crystal. He waved a hand over it, thinking he’d left it engaged when he was studying for his examination, cursing the waste and then regretting his curses, but the brilliance was only the natural sun tangled in the stone and not an emanation of power.

The room was bitterly cold. He glanced at his brazier and his bag of charcoal, counting his coins in his head. He’d bought some things for his mother: elegant ironwork, better than he could afford; fine paper for his sister, leather gloves for his father that he had made himself from expensive ibix leather. He didn’t have the money to waste on charcoal.

It was also the last day of classes, and most shops would be closed and most of his tutors had already left.

He looked down at the lines he’d transcribed.

In the beginning there was darkness, and a void, and yet there was the mind of Sophia. And She said the word, and the word was Light, and light filled the whole of the heavens, and there was yet no earth, no water, no fire, no air. All was light.

He looked at the letters he had just formed. Të gjitha është dritë in the tongue of home. School—the Academy—so far had been little more than a pile of languages and a lot of writing. A little practical philosophy, and a very, very little magik. And even that little was more theory than practice.

He brushed back his unbound hair and tried not to curse; transcribing sacred words was not supposed to be accompanied by inattention and blasphemy. But it was a pleasure to write in his own tongue and not one of the dry, dead tongues that the Academy seemed to prefer, like Ellene, which drove him mad. He’d almost failed Ellene.

He’d almost failed everything. He hadn’t, but it had been close.

He sighed and dipped his pen. He could see from the last fifteen characters and the dots over the vowels that his quill was beginning to fray and needed cutting, but he was in a hurry.

And She spoke into the void and there was light, but to the light She sang, and then there were the elements, air, and water, and fire and earth. And the word was song, and the song was the Song, and even as the elements distilled from the light, She desired other voices in Her song, and they joined Her. And there was polyphony, and harmony, and unity. And earth and fire made Earth, and air and water made the Sea; fire and air made the Stars, and earth and water the other planets, and each was a unity, and each was a living form amidst the Infinite; and the Void was not in opposition, but was filled, so that where there had been nothing, there was Everything.

He wrote, and breathed on his hands, dipped his quill, and wrote again. But when his next vowel had an unacceptably sloppy dot, he sat back, managed not to swear, and rummaged for his friend Kati’s penknife. She was a student from Safi, a far-off land of burning deserts, and she had already left for home, sixteen days by ship and camel. Her parents were rich, and very demanding, but he envied her. She was going home.

She’d left him her penknife, a precious thing, sharp as a razor, just two inches of superb steel. He sat back and took a fresh quill from a tube of them, and cut it: a cut at the reverse angle to help with shape, a squeeze of the fingers to break the quill and form a slit, and then another deft slice to shape the nib. He rolled the quill in his fingers, liked the result, and used the knife to trim the feather to fit his hand, murmuring an invocation to the dead bird for the use of her quill and another to harden the tip. He dipped and tried it on a scrap of laid paper; the line was fine and steady. He went back to his work on vellum, copying out the opening chapter of The Book of Wisdoms.

He looked out of the window again and wondered if he was prevaricating. He had an eight-day journey home, and it was warm enough in the City. Arnaud, his Westerner mate, a Frankese from the other end of the world, claimed it was warmer outside than it was in the room. But the City was warm and comfortable in many ways, and the trip home was no little thing; he’d have to work as a deckhand to take a ship, and then he’d have to walk across half of Soulis, his home province, to reach his parents. He felt the temptation to stay—to write them a letter and then go to bed for a few days. He could get some scribal jobs and do more leather-work and use the money to eat his fill.

He could take some extra fencing lessons. He was in love with his sword, purchased in a used clothing market on a whim. With his rent money, because he was a fool. He smiled at the memory without regret, and eyed the blade where it hung on a peg meant for a book sack, by the human skull Daud had bought.

Why did I buy that sword?

It had been a foolish, impulsive purchase—a winter’s savings gone in a few beats of his heart, as if he’d been laid under a compulsion. It wasn’t even the kind of sword he thought he favoured…

He took the freshly cut pen back to his high desk by the cold window and settled himself. He had about a hundred and sixty more lines to copy, and then he could give his sister something truly beautiful for the Day after Darknight. First Sun. A holiday in almost every religion in the City and at home.

He wrote, and wrote. He paused a few times, ate a handful of nuts, breathed on his hands, and, with a wry look, threw some charcoal on the brazier. But he was no longer giving any thought to staying, and he began to write faster, his letters as precise as they would have been on an Academy project. He’d survived his first year at the Academy. He’d learned a few things.

And now he was going home.