54. Sneaks (IV) (Patreon)

I almost died in the Largotto for the second time, but I did not die. I should hope that much was obvious.

Here's a little-known fact about mantis-sharks: their barbed pedipalps are lined with little stingers capable of injecting an anesthetic and paralytic toxin (apparently also an aphrodisiac to other mantis-sharks). This is why mantis-sharks are considered among the deadliest open ocean predators despite there being other creatures many times their size - they recognize humans as prey and their venom can incapacitate a fully-grown man in a minute and a child even more quickly. Once your lungs seize up, you're done for whether or not the shark eats you… that is, unless you have somebody like Rose Argent nearby.

"She was blowing into your mouth for like… well, it felt like a long time, but I figure it was about twenty minutes," Mailyn said. Fortunately, as potent as the shark's venom is, it's also short-lived, and I eventually started breathing on my own. Rose was able to stop her 'artificial respiration' and get me to safety. I woke up perhaps an hour after the attack at the school infirmary with Mailyn standing close vigil over me. Her eyes were red from crying and russet-red hair clung to her cheeks like loose hay. "I… I thought it was gonna eat you. The mantis-shark, not Rose. I was so scared…"

"Well… I'm alive," I croaked.

Not that it made me any happier to have miraculously survived a mantis-sharks attack - I couldn't move my right leg and I was convinced my career at the Collegium was done for, over after my very first day of Sneak classes. My leg was still attached to my body, but it just dangled there like a slab of dead meat. The other leg was a bit bruised but no worse for the day's outing.

To hear Mailyn recount it, when Rose saw what was happening, she'd slammed the beast with a blast of pure thaum. It's very lucky that none of my limbs (or Mailyn's) were in the way, because they would have been absolutely pulped. The front of our canoe had been splintered and the shark was very dead. Fewer than one in ten thousand people has that density of thaumic energy, and a good fraction of those are Shadows. The entire front of the mantis-shark exploded into chunks and the back half was now sitting in the Collegium's cold storage, waiting for somebody to make its flesh into a culinary masterpiece. As dead as the flesh of my right leg…

"I… maybe the artificers will have me," I said, willing the thunderheads of my sobs back for the moment. My dreams of being a Shadow were dashed, but I could still be successful and wealthy enough. Maybe I could still fund my revenge…

"Hmm… let's take a closer look at that leg, shall we?" A tall, middle-aged woman with cold, bony hands crouched in front of me. There was something gaunt and fleshless about her appearance that reminded me of shamblers, though she was very clearly alive. And her hands were immaculately clean, and each finger had a jeweled ring with a different alchemical sigil on it. My addled mind eventually informed me that this was probably Dr. Silvestria, the Collegium's chief surgeon and, by everybody's estimation, one of the top three in the world.

Allegedly, another one of the top three is also in Floria, working as a Master of the Collegium no less, though I couldn't tell you which Master that is.

With the utmost care, Dr. Silvestria unwound the bandage that Rose had wrapped around my thigh. "Passable," the doctor mumbled before crouching down further and inspecting the wound. Dr. Silvestria was almost a head taller than Rose (who is a bit above average height) but probably weighed a good five kilos less (and Rose is no heavyweight). Her bone-thin fingers tremored, and it took me a moment to realize she was casting some complex bit of thaumaturgy.

With a gesture, she splattered something green and smelling strongly of herbs over the injury, and then with the pulse of thaum, my wound began to writhe.

I screamed. I'm not proud of it, but I, a Sneak of the Collegium, screamed like a frightened child at the sight of the mess of flesh that was my right thigh wriggling as if infested by a thousand worms. Only the doctor's iron-cold look kept me from squirming away. I could see veins and arteries slithering and trembling beneath the skin, retreating like fans of frost during a springtime thaw… I watched as my flesh was stripped down to the muscle, slightly serrated in parts and stuck through by about a dozen inky-black bristles. Whatever Dr. Silvestria was doing, it looked like it should hurt a lot… I was quite lucky my leg was completely insensate.

Wielding a pair of forceps far more skillfully than I would have expected, far more deftly than I would have thought possible, she reached in and plucked the mantis-shark barbs out of my thigh, depositing them in a class phial - plink, pa-plink, plink. Apparently, several of the barbs had embedded close to my sciatic nerve, and their residual drip of venom was paralyzing my leg. The last of those barbs went into the vial and, with a wave of her hand and another pulse of thaum, my blood vessels, subcutaneous tissue, and skin advanced back over the muscle like the tide coming in. My leg was left… well, not as good as new. There were still some raw lacerations there, but at least it didn't look like bloody minced pork. Dr. Silvestria slathered some ointment over it and applied a wrapping about as deftly as a spider binding its meal. She then reached forward and squeezed my kneecap with her fingertips.

"Do you feel anything?"

"Pins and needles?" I said hopefully.

The doctor nodded sagely and handed me a slip of paper. "Good. Don't try to walk for another hour. Keep the activity mild to moderate for the next week and then resume normal activity. Return to the infirmary if the wound feels hot or inflamed."

"Thank you, Dr. Silvestria," I said.

"It's my job," she said. "And it's your job to get better. I hope I don't see you again."

From most people, that would be an insult. From Dr. Silvestria, it means she likes you.

"I take it you're not quitting the Collegium?" Mailyn asked.

I laughed, a glacier of stress I'd scarcely been aware of calving off. "Not just yet."

Rose and Dr. Silvestria spoke in hushed tones the next room over, presumably about me, and then Rose entered my room for the first time. She looked like she'd been crying, too, but she forced a smile and sat next to me on my infirmary cot.

"Vix… I promise that this was a freak accident. It's actually… very rare. I think the last river attack was when I was still a student. Our exercises are actually very safe…"

For the record, by 'safe', Rose meant that only two or three students required minor medical attention in the typical class. Seamanship classes, let alone Rose's ultracompetitive version of them, are not safe for children. They just aren't deadly. The Collegium doesn't do safe because it prepares us for a world that's unsafe.

"… so I understand if you're a little scared of the water now, and I'll have some exercises for you to do until your leg gets better. I'll keep you safe." She nudged my side. "Vix, please say something."

I realized that I'd been staring daggers into the floor. I softened my expression and looked Rose in the eye. "You won't always be around. I'll need to learn to kill mantis-sharks myself," I said.

Rose giggled and pulled me close. "That's our Vix. Shall we get street food?"

"Um… Vix can't walk for another forty-five minutes," Mailyn said.

Rose shrugged and hopped to her feet. "No worries, I'll carry her. I know a place that sells mantis-meat fritters."

Intellectually, I knew that what had transpired had been a freak occurrence. The shark had probably been starving, venturing upriver out of pure desperation, and its normal aversion to loud noise was overpowered by the faint scent of blood in the water - Mailyn wasn't the only Sneak to suffer minor cuts or a bloody nose. It had probably mistaken the white bottom of the canoe for the belly of a large fish, and I was unfortunate enough to get grabbed when it lashed out. I knew this intellectually, but I still couldn't help but think that dozens of the things were lurking beneath the surface. A week away from the buoy would do me some good - and, truth be told, I avoided being by myself in the open water for a good while afterward.

Meanwhile, I had other classes. On my 'odd' days, I had Basics of Thaumaturgy in the morning and combat classes in the afternoon. At most mage academies, schooling in thaumaturgy begins with lessons in Old Turan and the glyphs derived from their alphabet, often called 'runes'. However, all Scamps are taught Old Turan as part of our lessons to the extent that we're actually supposed to be conversant in it despite the fact that the language has been dead for five centuries. Therefore, our first thaumaturgy lessons involved finding our thaum, the spiritual core of magic that resides within every sapient creature. The difference between those who can and cannot do magic is the presence of the outer thaum, which connects our minds with the world around us, including our own bodies. Therefore, in order to learn how to control the world through magic a student must first learn to sense and then manipulate the outer thaum deliberately.

"Many of you have innate talents. These talents are a great blessing, but they are also a crutch," our instructor stated. "For these talents suggest that your outer thaum is naturally powerful - very powerful - and will only grow in time. But it also means you'll be tempted to manipulate your thaum in idiosyncratic ways that hamper your development in other areas of thaumaturgy. Therefore, our first lessons will cover how to sense the outer thaum and how to perturb it… that is to say, manipulate it, properly. Only then shall we begin to delve into the transformations of the outer thaum that allow for useful spellcraft."

Our instructor was an middle-aged fellow, perhaps sixty years old, on loan from the mage's guild. Truth be told, Mage Coffert wasn't an especially impressive mage since, at age sixty, he'd never made it past the middle rank of magecraft (the ranks being apprentice, adept, mage, magister, and senior magister - the latter of these being the infamous Signor/Signora of Gionian wizards). But at least he looked the part with his unkempt, graying hair, braided goatee, stately robes, spectacles, and floppy velveteen hat. And, truth be told, he didn't have to be a great Signor to teach a bunch of neophyte Sneaks - it was far more important that he was able to communicate what we were doing right or wrong while maintaining the patience of a saint.

"It's not working!" the girl next to us whined.

Mage Coffert smiled warmly, wincing a bit as he crouched down to sit on the floor in front of her. "Hmm… trouble getting the filament to light?"

She nodded, glaring at him as if he'd done something wrong. The mage took it in stride, adjusting his spectacles and then tapping on the glowglobe filament to ensure that it was functioning - it was, of course. "Well… what did we say to do if it wasn't working?"

"Bring it closer?"

"Bring it closer. Don't worry about what the students over there are doing - you'll get there eventually." He inched the filament's little brass stand about fifteen centimeters closer to the girl. "Now… Gertrude, was it?"

"Gertie."

He nodded sagely. "Now, Gertie, why don't you try again?"

After a little huffing and a little trial and error, she got it right. Now… unless you're a mage or phenomenally talented, you probably activate artifices by touching them. To do so requires only the barest notion of one's outer thaum, a general feeling of pushing out one's energy. The artifice will pick up on the energy and absorb it from the entirety of your diffuse field. However, to activate an artifice at any significant distance, you must be able to project your thaum directionally, and to do this, you need to perceive the thaumic sense that lies latent in us all. There are many mystical paths to achieving this awareness, rich in introspective revelations, but modern thaumaturgy has arrived at an easier and more pragmatic approach of successive approximations. Students are trained to illuminate a glowglobe filament a handful of centimeters from their body, and then the filament is gradually moved back until the student can activate the filament at a meter or more away.

Ironically, these exercises are often the hardest for more naturally-gifted students. Mailyn and I could both brute-force a filament from half a meter away without any focus. We tried to determine whose range was greater with ambiguous results - she had the distance record, but my distances were more consistent. We both averaged around fifty-five centimeters (this calculation made possible by our mathematics class). It took both of us forever to manage a filament beyond seventy-five centimeters. I thought I could feel my thaum. I thought I could feel it focusing toward the front of my body. But then, when I expelled that energy… nada. No light. Mailyn had no luck, either…

"I got it!" she shrieked. The filament was set at eighty centimeters past the line, or so the little chalk mark told me.

I inactivate the filament and pushed the little brass stand another five centimeters back. "Go again," I said.

She did so, little motes of fire flashing in her eyes as she pulsed her thaum forward. And, sure enough, the filament flared to life. "See?" she said, jostling my shoulder. "It lit!"

While I was excited for Mailyn - I really was - I was as competitive then as I am now. Not to be outdone, I pushed my own filament back to ninety centimeters and settled down into our cross-legged meditative sit. Eyes open, I unfocused into the indeterminate distance as I turned my attention inward, in toward that roiling cauldron of infinite energy called the thaum. While the inner thaum is easy enough to locate (and exceedingly difficult to manipulate), the outer thaum is the exact opposite. It pales in magnitude, effervescent and ever-flowing. At my crude level of understanding, I couldn't yet perceive its wisps and eddies, only the gradual rise and fall like the pulsing corona of a sun. And, when there was more rise than fall in the direction that seemed to be frontward, I pushed. I pushed hard.

The filament lit, and an instant later the stand tipped over and clattered across the floor. Papers crinkled and swirled around and the boy three meters away from us tipped over with a yelp and sprawled across the floor. Mage Coffert scurried over to him to make sure he was okay - and he was. Surprised, to be sure, but uninjured. Then he cast a leery eye to me, correctly gauging from my surprised reaction that the effect had been unintended.

"Students with kinetic gifts need to be very careful to keep their thaum unshaped," he said.

I nodded uncertainly - we'd already heard a variant of this speech after Mailyn's first few attempts had resulted in gouts of flame and crackles of electricity shooting off on random tangents. "But… I don't do kinetomancy…" Or at least I hadn't ever done so.

"Well… you do now," the mage said. Deep in thought, he tugged at his braided goatee. "I think you two should go to the power corner."

The power corner - that was the part of the classroom abutting the stone wall of the building's exterior. The mage called it the 'power corner' to placate the students who practiced there, but really it was to make sure students with dangerous abilities and poor control were pushing their thaum at inert stone rather than flammable wood or other students. It was the danger corner.

Thus did Mailyn and I practice in the danger corner, occasionally buffeted by poorly-constrained flashes of force, energy, or stranger things yet from the other students in our ilk. And, frankly, the exercises soon became boring. Once you felt your outer thaum and knew how to direct it, practicing at greater and greater distances became an exercise in tedium. It remained a useful exercise, no doubt, but it was boring. Once a meter and a half became trivial, we switched to the next exercise, which was to try the same thing with a filament to the side, and then one directly behind you. This, too, soon became trivial, and so Mage Coffert introduced us to the next exercise.

"For this exercise, you'll keep your eyes closed," he said, shuffling about to my side. "Okay… now you just need to light the filament."

"Again?" I said - I wished there was something to practice on other than filaments.

"Again," he stated firmly.

I sighed, my eyes remaining closed. "Yes, sir. So… where is it?"

"Ah… but that's for you to figure out," he chuckled.

I didn't manage to complete that exercise - not in that class period. But, mind you, it was only my first class - all things considered, my progress was pretty phenomenal. Mailyn did manage to light a hidden filament on her very last try, but I maintain that she probably heard me set the thing down. It was beginner's luck.

From there, we made our way to our next class: Basic Combat.