52. Sneaks (II) (Patreon)

My resistance to being nicknamed 'princess' just about guaranteed that it was my nickname for my first few weeks as a Sneak. Princess Vix, they would call me, and I'd try to ignore it. When our bunk boss, Nafiah, heard folks calling me that, he would frown and tell them that they weren't being very nice. And that was about the extent of his intervention - in Nafiah's opinion, as long as a bunk member wasn't seriously injuring you, any rivalries or disputes between us could be settled amongst the kids involved. The fact that Aria, Nafiah's underboss, seemed to think it was funny to make me glower meant there were a lot of 'Princess Vix' references until she got bored and moved on to her next victim a few weeks later.

Nafiah and Aria - those were my bosses in Crew 61. Nafiah was an Arkavian boy around sixteen years old, average height but uncommonly broad and with hair almost as dark as mine, not the stereotypical red-tinted coils of most Arkavians. He wasn't exactly mean, but I think the only time I ever saw him smile was when he realized he was about to get the upper hand in a fight… which happened fairly often. He could wrestle like nobody's business and had, apparently, placed third in an all-city no-thaumaturgy archery competition not too far back. Aria, on the other hand, was slim and slight, only four or five centimeters taller than me despite being three and a half years older. Her skin was about the same shade as my own, her hair just as dark, but her aquiline nose and broad lips hinted at Veredian heritage, the people of Western Garvinjiy. Despite the reputation of those people as contemplative mystics, she was sardonic and intense, and she carried her diminutive stature like a great big chip on her shoulder. But boy was she effective at keeping the crew on point in the mornings.

"All right, eight o'clock! If you're not already up, you're late!" she snapped. To drive her point home, she banged two pans together and, when one girl attempted to hunker down and cover her ears with a pillow, she continued to bang them right over the girl's head. "That includes you, sleeping beauty! Up! Anybody not ready to go in ten will be doing privy duty in their jammies!" She shot me a look, nodding in approval when she noted that I was already dressed. I'd woken up an hour earlier, which was actually a bit late for me, and had been reading ever since there was enough dawn to do so. "Princess, I don't imagine you've ever had to touch a privy before, so you're with me!"

"I have so," I protested.

"Your royal bum don't count, highness," she said, and I got the impression that further protestations would meet even harsher rebukes, so I let things stand at that.

Each of the eight crews in a residence halls is assigned to one of four tasks on any given week (one of those tasks being 'rest', a week off from bunk duty). Of the remaining three tasks, each is divided among two crews:
1) Breakfast, prep and cleanup
2) Dormitory maintenance, interior and exterior
3) Bathroom duty, baths and privy

Yes, the residence halls had actual baths - eight full tubs for the hundred or so residents in the hall. If you timed things right, you could be fairly fastidious in your hygiene without having to venture to the Largotto for daily ablutions. There was plenty of running water, clean and cool, fed by some subterranean canal or qanat, and there were heating runes in the tubs that would bring the temperature to lukewarm. Any warmer than that and you needed your own thaumaturgical tricks. When you had bath duty, it was your job to drain the tubs, scrub everything clean, rinse the scum out, and dispose of any unclaimed garments. And, believe you me, a hundred physically-active adolescents can do a lot to a bathroom in the course of a day. That said, bath duty has nothing on privy duty, because a hundred hungry adolescents do unspeakable things to a privy in a startlingly short period of time. I have to wonder whether some of them just ate anything on the streets that looked edible, only to have it come blowing out the other end. Beyond scrubbing everything to a pristine gleam and distributing odor-absorbing alchemical incense, a few brave souls had to venture down to the sewer and shovel whatever hadn't made it into the sluice channel into said channel. Otherwise, the pile would grow and grow and we'd have a lovely fecal flood bubbling up the next time there was a big storm. Or so Aria claimed.

"Don't give me that face, princess, it's only shit!" Aria barked at me. I didn't point out how the other two shovelers were also making disgusted faces and that it was an involuntary reaction to the mixed aroma of ammonia and feces. She tapped her foot and then added, "It comes out of everybody's arse, even yours!" She made a stink face when nobody else snickered. Of course, the three of us already had completely involuntary stink faces dominating our expressions.

Consider a hundred adolescents each excreting roughly a kilogram a day, half of which makes it into the drainage channel. That leaves another fifty just sitting there. It's not a very big pile and it took us about five minutes to shovel ninety-five percent into the water. The remaining five percent was spread around and a lot harder to get to, but Aria insisted that we push every last bit into the channel to minimize the stink that made its way back up. Once we were done, she banged on the pipes to signal the crew up above that it was safe to drain their dirty water down the pipes, and it all came splattering down. Which, honestly, would have washed away most of the five percent we'd spent so much time scrubbing away. But Aria was set in her ways and she was the boss.

"Do it perfectly and by yourself next time, and I'll transfer you upstairs to learn the top half. How does that sound?"

"Whatever the boss thinks is best," I said.

Aria laughed at that. "If you do exactly what I say and when I say it, you might make a decent Sneak some day. But don't hold your breath."

"That's right - breathe through your mouth," Billy Stout said, shaking his bandana. "Otherwise, you'll pass out."

Aria nodded. "And, if you ever feel light-headed in the sewers, for the love of the saints, tell somebody! Sure, we'll make fun of you for it. Probably a lot. But that's better than suffocating surrounded by human waste."

"Human is questionable," Billy said.

"Hmm… maybe so, considering what these animals eat."

After privy duty, I wiped down and changed for breakfast. The smell of the sewers still clung to me like a permeating grease, but I could neither see nor feel any filth actually on my body, so I assume it was half-psychological. Not entirely psychological, though, because Mailyn wrinkled her nose at me when I wandered out into the common hall to meet up with her and her crew, which had been on bath duty. In contrast to my lovely sewer aroma, she smelled like abrasive soap and her fingertips were pink from scrubbing.

"Ready for breakfast?" she asked, and I nodded excitedly. Our first meal as Sneaks… well, if you didn't count leftover dinner rolls the night before.

Breakfast among the residence halls isn't so different from that with the Scamps, with the exception that the crew picks what they want from the Collegium's cold stores right across the avenue from the hall, plus each hall has a mixed garden for fresh greens, fruit, mushrooms, and herbs. Each garden is bolstered by Collegium-taught thaumaturgy, and so there's generally enough available for each Sneak and Greycloak to have a little fresh-picked food with every meal. Add on top of that that the older students have been cooking breakfasts for years and can be quite competitive - it's not at all unusual for former Collegium students to convincingly pass as estate cooks or even trained chefs when doing undercover work. As a result, breakfast was our best meal of the day. For example, our breakfast that morning consisted of corn fritters with garden herbs, seared tomato strips with olive oil, slices of vine-plum straight from the garden and sprinkled with sugar, and sliced kamaboko (Perditan fish sausage) in fried rice with ring peppers. It was enough to feed all of us, and it was as good as any fare you could hope to find for tollos in a street stall, though it fell somewhat short of fine dining. There was also tea, coffee, juice, and cold water, as much as you could drink. I ate and drank my fill, since I didn't know when lunch was coming, and realized that the tea was caffeinated only half-way through mathematics when I realized I felt jittery and really had to pee.

Luckily, our morning mathematics class was nothing new. The instructor gave Mailyn and me each a blank notebook and a pamphlet of problems, sitting us across from a pair of boys a few months our senior who could help us if we ran into trouble. We didn't need the help - Mailyn was damn good at math, and me? Well, let's just say my parents used to present me at salons and have their friends and clients give me multiplication and division problems to solve in my head, marveling over a six-year-old girl solving five-digit division out to several decimal places and faster than anybody could compute them on an abacus. I hadn't gotten any worse at calculation and had picked up a good amount of variable mathematics in the years since then. No, math wasn't going to be a problem for us. We finished our problem set within forty-five minutes, at which point I rushed out to use the privy and returned to see that Mr. Jiano, our math teacher, had given us a geometry workbook entitled 'Geometric Induction and the Imputation of Natural Theorems'. I'm still not sure what that means, but I have and had no issue with the problems.

After mathematics, we had fifty minutes before our afternoon class. It was a good time to grab lunch… only, we were expected at Alhred Island at one o'clock, and we didn't dare be late for our first class with Rose.

Perhaps I should explain a typical Sneak's schedule before I get on with that particular class, because it will take a while and you might well wonder how a prestigious academy can get away with offering two classes per day, one of which is essentially battling one another on the open water. In brief, each Sneak takes four classes at any given time - two per day on alternating days. There's a morning class, generally an academic class, that runs from ten minutes past ten until ten minutes past noon. Following a mid-day break, there's another two-hour class, often (but not always) a physical class from one o'clock to three o'clock in the afternoon. You'll take these classes on an even-day, odd-day schedule for anywhere from several weeks to several months, at which point you'll be switched to a different class. The idea here is that, once you've become proficient in one domain of learning, you're better off switching to a different area before returning a few weeks to months later to approach what you've already learned with a new perspective. It may sound counterintuitive - you'd think three years of consistent class would be better than having a month-long switch to a different subject every ten or twelve weeks, but the Collegium's results are pretty conclusive. We produce graduates who are as competent as those of the great academies, and in many more fields of learning.

Each Sneak is expected to take eight classes in their first year - there are no 'electives' until later in our education. These eight are: Mathematics, History, Rhetoric & Composition, Cultural Studies (dance, music, poetry, etc.), Thaumaturgy, Seamanship, Survival, and Combat. Any student who doesn't reach a reasonable proficiency with all of these isn't long for the Collegium.

"Do you think seamanship will be dangerous?" Mailyn asked me as we made our way down to the pier. We were following after one of her bunk-mates, Driane, a girl almost a year ahead of us but not quite ready to make the jump to intermediate seamanship.

I chewed on my lunch and swallowed - left over corn fritters from breakfast dipped in curds and fish sauce. I washed it down with a liberal squirt from my water skin. "She wouldn't be dangerous on the first day. I imagine she'll just try to teach us some basic skills… and maybe exhaust us to show that sailor's work is hard."

"I already know it's hard. I've seen sailors in action before," Mailyn said.

"Seeing is different from doing," Driane said. "But you've got the basic idea down. Lots of physical activity. Lots of swimming, lots of hitting…"

"Hitting?" I said.

Driane chuckled. "You'll see."