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“Mother?” a child called, probably woken by the sound of the key in the door. “Mother, is that you? I knew you’d come back for me! Mother? Mother?”
“I’m not your mother,” Khem replied. True, but a foolish thing to say nonetheless. What did one say to one of the residents of a makeshift orphanage? How did one begin to explain that the children had been cared for so that the proprietor, a blue dragon masquerading as an elf, could later eat them? That the dragon had flown away after Harper had tried to stab it – which probably wouldn’t have been more than an irritant to a creature of that size, even if it hadn’t somehow gotten away from the sunsword at its throat? That they now had no idea what to do with seventeen children and a building to which the dragon might return?
Well. One left it for people who were better at talking to others. People who understood children.
“Go back to sleep,” Khem told the piping voice. “Things will be… better.” Possibly a lie. She didn’t know. It sounded like the sort of thing Harper and Katy said to children, though.
“Are you an angel?”
“No.”
Definitely the truth, and apparently enough to answer the child’s curiosity, for there were no further questions as Khem hurried away. Leave Harper and Rizven to keep an eye on things at the estate of ‘Calindril Coppermane’; take Katy to sob out the evening’s work to Bren, and hope the innkeeper had sufficient contacts to deal with the children; realise that Rizven actually didn’t know how to cook – and it was stupid, stupid, that she’d assumed a slave kept as a gladiator by a creature who ate raw brains would be able to cook – and offer him academic fragments of knowledge about soup gleaned from unrelated history books; return to the sewers beneath the building to retrieve a sample of the dragon’s fewmets so that she could attempt to scry it when Harper and Katy decided the ‘Orphaneater’ needed to be killed; try to assist with soup and somehow create boiling slurry that hardened in seconds to the approximate density of stone; try to persuade Rizven that it clearly wasn’t his fault, he’d been doing fine before you’d interfered; prestidigitate the mess away and realise that the children were asleep anyway and wouldn’t need food for several hours yet, and in fact sleep was very necessary if you were going to try to hunt down a blue dragon tomorrow…
And sleep was its own problem. She would ordinarily have cast the mansion, but it had been a long day, and with Harper’s ‘You don’t always have to run away, Khem’ echoing in her mind, even the safety of a tiny hut seemed…
Well. No denying the hyet-ptamun had been sharper recently, and attempts to salve the hurts or straighten the tangles mostly ineffective. She could sacrifice her shelter for a display of trust, even if Harper wouldn’t notice while he drank and brooded about the children and the dragon’s escape. Khem set out her bedroll in a corner of the study, cold wind blowing through what was left of the window the dragon had burst through, and ignored the sound of Katy snoring from Harper’s lap long enough to let her dreams draw her in.
The rough beast, again, its jaws slavering blue starlight as it paces in a circle – the Silent, tearing a star from his throat – a glimpse of the Thirsty curled around a grey sphere of stone as the Erratic seeks her – a gem-scaled serpent, coiled around a pillar larger than all the world, hairline fractures speeding through the rock -
Khem woke. The air through the window was still cold, but carried the scents of the waking city - baking bread, and the change of tide. Cyric and Cyric and Harper and - nothing new there, although the figure that represented Shay had been growing rarer since she’d gone. She resented that, resented more the implication that whatever whimsy that governed her oneiromancy had deemed Shay unimportant or irrelevant… resented most that perhaps it might be correct, that missing her friend was the same as attempting to impose a claim Khem had surrendered when she let Shay leave her.
Enough of that. Time to face the day’s work.
Harper was cooking toast, with no sign of the problems that had destroyed the soup-attempt. A small elven girl sat on the bench beside him, and they were chattering away. There was something about watching Harper with children. Khem didn’t understand why they made him so happy and didn’t feel the same way, but it was… good… to see all the same. When Harper told Genevieve that all the children could have as much butter on their toast as they wanted, she shrieked and ran off to wake and tell them.
They had barely enough time to decide where to feed them – the dining room was unsuitable, since Khem had dispelled the illusions hiding years’ worth of bloodstains, and using the mansion to create a clean duplicate too great an investment - before the kitchen was crowded with pushing and clamouring children everywhere eating toast. Like a flock of sparrows descending on crumbs, the food disappeared almost instantaneously; when Khem suggested they grab whatever books they wanted from the little schoolroom before they left, they dispersed almost as efficiently, and gathered up again in a flock for Harper and Katy to marshal them to go to Bren’s.
“Everyone take the hand of someone else,” Katy ordered them, her voice assuming a tone very similar to the one Harper habitually used when talking to children. “Like, always two people together.”
Obediently, a gnome child, a third smaller than the youngest of the human children, reached up and took Katy’s hand. There were already four children on Harper… all over him, really, as if to draw a very clear demonstration of how different he was. He seemed happy, again, confident despite the fact he could never have defended himself if he’d been attacked. Not with one child astride his shoulders, her hands starfished all over Harper’s forehead and eyes, another clinging to his back, and one swinging from each arm as if they were tree branches. Even Rizven was holding the hand of one of the older boys, although the other rested on his scabbard.
So the others were at least partially distracted or hampered, which meant Khem would have to watch more carefully for potential threats. Not one of her stronger skills, which was one reason why the tug at her sleeve caught her off-guard. And it wasn’t an attack, it was only a child, but what was she supposed to do about that, she didn’t want to hold onto a child, wasn’t sure she could, but -
Oh.
The girl was about eight years old. She gazed up at Khem with wide dark eyes, a red sleeve caught in one hand and the other gripping a tattered owlbear doll. The orc blood spoke more clearly in her large bones and full-grown tusks than it had in Shay, the likeness was only racial, not personal, but…
Khem remembered.
She’d been sixteen, raw and angry, less than a tenday passed since Khaizri and her sycophants, with the faint insidious touch of their mage hands, had… well. Enough time to learn a cloying smile and hollow flirtations, to build a facade she could survive behind; not enough time to kill Khaizri. Mistress Aneth-ke and Master Djanbi had taken half of the students to visit the Long Death Monastery. Allies of proven worth, Master Djanbi described them, after an entire class spent detailing the nature of that alliance and how it might affect the young Red Wizards, and what they might expect to see when they visited.
“They’ll probably share some of their more public projects,” Mistress Aneth-ke had said. “Don’t touch anything unless specifically invited. Don’t offer your opinion at all. Red Wizard students you might be, but you don’t have the experience to make an intelligent comment on their work. Treat them with the respect you would show any of your instructors.”
“Above all,” Master Djanbi had said, shortly before he signalled his apprentices to cast the teleportation circle, “discipline. You will not cast a single spell while on monastery grounds. Not so much as a cantrip. I don’t care if you get soaked with blood and faecal matter, one move to prestidigitate yourself off, and I will take it as a personal insult.”
“Yes, Master Djanbi,” Khem had chorused with the others, and then they stepped into the circle. It had been the first time Khem had experienced that wrench of dislocation, twisted through planar space to surface somewhere else. She hadn’t liked the sensation - still didn’t, truthfully, and it was worse when she was casting a true teleport, straining to hold her destination and worrying she might drop one of her friends along the way, but it was too valuable a spell to avoid for so petty a reason.
They’d seen a lot that day – what became of the slaves the Academy sent to the Monastery for disposal, for a start. The experiments the Long Death monks enjoyed were scientifically rigorous and meticulously documented explorations of just how much a body could take and not die. Impressive, in its way, but disturbing even for Red Wizard students. The chatter and commentary had died down as they were shown from library to morgue to public vivisection theatre to private laboratory, and by the time they were taken up to the slave testing pit, the students were standing much closer to each other than any would normally find comfortable. It was probably the expected reaction, Khem thought; Mistress Aneth-ke had given a withered little smirk at the sight.
“Ah, welcome,” a monk had greeted the wizards, waving them to a place around the lip of the pit. “Always an honour to have observers from the Academy.”
“And a pleasure to tour your charming monastery, Master Chauncey,” Mistress Aneth-ke had replied. “I trust our students have not been too great an interruption to your work?”
“Not at all, not at all. You’re just in time for the initial review of one of the more interesting specimens of our recent collection. Half grey orc female, eight years of age. The trader claimed she’s quite the killer already…” He’d laughed. “But don’t they always?”
“I’ve never known an honest slave trader,” Master Djanbi had agreed.
“We’re going to try her with a giant spider, see if she’s inherited that orcish endurance. We might be able to make something of her.”
As the instructors exchanged pleasantries with the senior monks, Khem had leaned over the pit’s edge and peered down. The half-orc looked very small, but less afraid than angry. She’d looked up, her gaze challenging those gathered to see her kill or die.
Her eyes – wide, dark - had met Khem’s, and there had been – something. Khem had stared, trying to identify it, to understand what pulled at the back of her mind, but then the spider was loosed and the child had hurled herself into battle with it, teeth and clawed fingers and a shrill, defiant scream that hung on the air like a vulture. Khem had watched, useless, still not comprehending but unable to look away. The half-orc gripped and tore at the underside of the abdomen, trying to find a way through the exoskeleton to more vulnerable flesh.
She wanted the half-orc to win, Khem had realised. It didn’t make any sense – why should she care if the monks killed and dismembered one more child? It wasn’t any of her business, and it wasn’t as if she were sentimental – she’d killed Pteptah at a very similar age herself. It shouldn’t have mattered if the half-orc lived or died.
But it had mattered, and it felt like she should know why it mattered, and she didn’t, but she had to watch, had to see it when the spider’s fangs speared into the child’s shoulder and she went limp and lifeless.
The monks had leaned forward.
Khem’s breath had caught in her throat – she couldn’t be dead, come on, survive -
- and the half-orc tore a handful of the spider’s innards free and tumbled away from the beast more dead than alive.
“Yes.” The whisper had escaped against her will, fierce and certain and all too audible. Tuhari had heard, had seized upon it, and the touch of her sekhme-at and all that followed had rendered the half-orc all but forgotten and irrelevant for years. Nine years, long and difficult, before she had been assigned a bodyguard from the Long Death, and had recognised Shay…
… The eyes were wrong, the face was wrong. The half-orc girl who looked up at Khem wasn’t Shay.
Khem lifted her head, staring pointedly ahead and away from the child.
Carefully, gently, she tugged the tiny hand from her sleeve and curled hers around it.