Birthright-The Technomage Archive Page 7

  The class was silent again, and Roman just shook his head. “You guys are going to have to lighten up and talk to me eventually, or this is going to be a very long year.”

  ***

  Several hours later, the students were finally dismissed. They began to stand up and mill about aimlessly as students tend to do, and Roman said, “On each of your terminals is a room assignment.” The Recruits went back to their desks. “You will each have your own, private quarters. Make yourself comfortable. If you’re one of those lucky few who become Apprenticed, this room will be your home for the next six years.”

  The class began to murmur, but Roman continued speaking. “If you are from Ennd’s or Cernt Academies, your belongings have already been transferred to your new rooms. If you are from Ferahgo Academy, your things should arrive tomorrow morning. No matter which school you’re from, though, you will find new training uniforms in each of your assigned quarters. I’ll be making rounds to check in with each of you later this evening. Unless there are questions, you may go.”

  As the students moved toward the door, Ceril saw Roman smile mischievously. “Good luck finding your quarters. I'll see you all tomorrow.”

  ***

  Ceril hated his quarters.

  It wasn't that they weren't nice. They were. The room was just nothing special. The room was big enough, and it had a similar layout to the Phase II dormitory he was supposed to share with Swarley at Ennd’s. The problem with this room was that Ceril had no roommate to fill the extra space. The room was pretty empty, except for his bed, a desk, and a trio of chairs in one corner. He assumed it was so that Recruits could study together, or visit each other.

  But he was alone, and he didn’t know anyone. Having extra chairs and no one to fill them made Ceril homesick.

  If he understood Roman correctly, none of the Recruits had roommates. Ceril was sure there was good reason for it, but after years of Phase I and living with a roommate, a good reason didn’t make his quarters any less lonely.

  As Ceril examined the room, he found his uniforms hanging in the closet—three identical sets of full-body fatigues. They were dark blue, maybe even black, and had a zipper going from the crotch to the neck. They looked like they would be a little big on him.

  His name was on the right breast. Only it wasn’t patched or embroidered like the rest of the uniform’s decoration. It was displayed on a tiny, flexible screen. When he touched it, it just felt like the fabric of the fatigues. As he watched, the text on the screen rotated between CERIL and RECRUIT. He figured that once he picked a path of study, it would rotate between MEDIC, SCHOLAR, or SOLDIER, too.

  He smiled as he watched his name and rank rotate in and out. Maybe being a technomage wasn't going to be so bad.

  As he flicked between the uniforms, he saw a dress hanging behind the fatigues. Not a dress. A robe. It was thin, but surprisingly heavy. There was no zipper anywhere, which gave him the impression it had been made to pull over his everyday clothes—probably the fatigues. The robe, like the fatigues, had patches and insignias on the sleeves. It even had the rotating nametag screen. Ceril liked the robe far more than he did the fatigues, so he pulled it over his head and noticed a heavy hood. He pulled it over his head and looked around the room.

  No mirror. He sighed because he was sure that he looked like a villain from a cheesy holovid, and he wanted to see it. He let out a low “mwahahahahaha” to complete his mental image of himself. His playful megalomania was interrupted by a high-pitched trill that came from the desk in the center of the room. The paging system at Ennd’s used the same sound.

  “Answer,” he said.

  A holographic bust of Roman appeared above the desk. The bearded man’s eyes fixed on Ceril, and he smiled. “Making yourself right at home, I see. How do you like your quarters, Ceril?”

  Ceril snapped the hood from his head and he moved closer to the desk. “They're fine, sir. Thank you.”

  “I'm glad to hear it, Ceril,” said Roman. “I just wanted to make sure that you had everything you needed.”

  “I think so, sir,” Ceril said.

  “Very well, then,” Roman said. “Your itinerary for the next month of orientation has been sent to your tablet.” As he spoke, a section of the desk’s surface peeled away to reveal a portable computing tablet. “If you have any questions, please ask.”

  “I will,” said Ceril. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Have a good evening, Ceril,” said Roman.

  “You, too,” Ceril replied, but Roman's image had already faded.

  Ceril plopped down on his bed. From where he lay, he could see out of the room’s single window. Just having a window meant his quarters were on the outside edge of the ship, near the hull. He put his arms behind his head and stared outside.

  There wasn't a lot to see, though. A constantly shifting series of colors blurred outside the window and whipped around the hull. Ceril remembered something Roman had said during his lecture earlier that day. “Don’t be frightened just because you look out the window and don't see stars.”

  He hadn’t thought anything about it before. In the classroom, the window that opened onto hyperspace just seemed like a wall of the room, a fixture as normal as the paint in his grandfather’s kitchen. Now, Ceril could see why Roman had thought to give them all that warning. Alone, looking out the window of a spaceship and actually being unable to see space was disconcerting. More than that, Ceril thought that seeing those splotches of bright color whirling around was a little scary.

  He broke himself away from the mesmerizing window, and found his bag in the rear of the closet. He smiled as he placed the picture of Gramps dead center on his desk.

  He hated that he hadn’t been able to talk to Gramps about being recruited as a Charon. After this summer and the sword, he wanted to see how Gramps would react to finding out that those old stories weren't just stories. He couldn't wait until next summer to tell Gramps all about it. Well, he hoped it would be next summer. That’s the way Ennd’s had always worked. You went to school during the fall and winter, and you went home during summer. He had just assumed the Inkwell Sigil worked that way, too. He would have to ask Roman about that sometime.

  Surely, Roman hadn’t meant they would live onboard for six years with no breaks.

  Had he?

  At least Headmaster Squalt had said he would contact Gramps to tell him that Ceril had been recruited. I wonder when we’ll get to call home, Ceril thought. Can we call home from a spaceship? Ceril pondered that momentarily, and assumed that he could. They had, after all, just opened a door and walked onto the ship. Why wouldn’t they be able to make calls, too?

  Ceril reached for the tablet and collapsed with it back on the bed. It was a typical tablet like the ones he had gotten used to using at Ennd’s. The device was bigger than his hand or a PDA, but smaller than most of the books on Gramps' shelf. It was thin and not heavy at all. He tapped the screen twice, and it came alive.

  Immediately, he could see the entire schedule Roman had said would be there. Ceril didn’t even bother reading through it. After the day he just had, just shut the tablet off and tossed it on the desk. The tablets at Ennd’s were sturdy, and he knew this one could take a quick toss like that. However, he was surprised when the tablet was just about to land on the desk, it stopped in midair. It bobbed up and down a couple of times, and then the desk reached up and grabbed it out of the air.

  Ceril blinked. The desk had become…not solid for a moment. Blobs or tendrils of liquid desk had wrapped themselves around the tablet and pulled it to the surface. Then the desk absorbed the device, so that the only item on its surface was the picture Ceril had just sat down.

  Ceril blinked. Part of his mind knew that what he had just seen was real, that the desk’s behavior was just another piece of technomage engineering, but the exhausted side told him that he just needed to sleep and to disregard it. He listened to the side that told him to sleep.

  He got up to turn off the lights, but couldn�
��t find a switch. That was when he realized that his room, like the classroom, was being illuminated entirely by the colorful glow of hyperspace through the window. It wasn’t like starlight or moonlight. The shifting colors were different from anything he had ever seen. Ceril just shook his head in amazement.

  He undressed and fell asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes.

  Chapter Six

  It took Ceril a year to finally decide that he wanted to train to be a scholar. The deciding factor? Of the three choices offered, scholars were the ones who got the coolest toys.

  Sure, a lot of a scholar’s time was spent in a library doing research, but from what Roman had said, they were also the ones who got to apply that research and experiment with making new magic and devices. One thing bothered him, though: even after nearly a year of being aboard the Inkwell Sigil, Ceril still wasn’t quite sure what the difference was between magic and technology.

  Growing up, there had been a difference. Now, not so much. He thought that the two sounded basically the same, that the Charons used their devices and technology to such a high level of expertise and precision that they appeared as though they were magic to non-Charons.

  Maybe he would get a better explanation next year when he started his scholar training.

  And besides, Ceril just couldn't see himself as a soldier or a medic. If Roman nixed his becoming a scholar, or he couldn’t make it through the training, medic was his second choice because they also got to play with a lot of tech, and maybe design some of it themselves. The problem was that they were responsible for other people’s lives. Ceril didn’t know if he wanted that kind of responsibility. He didn't think he had a steady enough hand to be a healer of any sort.

  Being a soldier was out of the question. He had ruled that one out quickly. He had no desire to risk his life every time he stepped through an Instance portal. Ceril was going to do everything in his power to stay out of trouble. Even though Erlon had been mostly peaceful for years, that situation could change fast.

  And even though Roman had said he would be returning to Erlon at some point, Ceril had seen enough of the upperclassmen prepping for Instance runs that he knew Erlon wasn’t the only destination out there. There were enough battlefields out there to kill him a thousand times over. No, sir, Ceril thought. I don't care what they say about me already having a Flameblade; I'm no soldier.

  Roman was in a really good mood that day. As the students filed into the classroom, Ceril approached him and said, “Can I talk to you for a second before we get started?”

  “You know you can. What can I do for you, Ceril?”

  “I think I know what I want to study. I think I want to be a scholar, do research and all that.”

  Roman's face lit up. He said, “I have to tell you right now, Ceril, it’s not as glamorous as the other two paths, but I do think it’s the most fulfilling.”

  “I’m not looking for glamour, sir.”

  “Then what are you looking for?”

  Ceril’s cheeks flushed red. He thought about a good way to say it. He couldn’t just tell Roman that he wanted some neat toys to play with. “I think that I want to work with technology, invent things, new things.” A little lower: “Magic.”

  Roman tilted his bed back and let out a single guffaw. “There’s nothing wrong with that, son. Not a thing. That’s pretty much the reason I went the scholar’s route myself. I’m kind of addicted to technology.”

  “Me, too,” Ceril said. “It just makes me happy.”

  “But what do you plan on doing with that Flameblade you’ve got?” Roman asked. “I’ve told you before that I’ve never seen anyone your age with one. I think we only have a handful of students—six, I think—on board right now who even get to train with them, much less have one of their own. And even they have to share the weapons between themselves.”

  “I hadn't really thought about it.”

  “Well, think about it. Nowhere does it say that just because you're going to school to be a brainy-type that you can't learn to use your own equipment, too. Since you've already got the sword, you might as well learn to use it, you know?”

  “I don't know, sir,” Ceril said. “I'm not really much of a fighter. I can’t even figure out how to make the thing show up when I want it.”

  “Never said you were a fighter, but those swords are mighty hard to come by these days. It’s even harder to get them to bond with soldier Recruits. To have one bond with a wannabe scholar before he was even a Recruit is pretty much unheard of.”

  Ceril hadn’t thought about that, either.

  “I have no problem with you, Ceril,” Roman continued. “And I think you’ll do just fine as a bookworm. I just ask that you think about all the unique opportunities life is presenting you with these days. Can I ask you to at least think about learning to use the Flameblade?”

  Ceril nodded. And think about it, he did.

  ***

  Even after the first year, students had very little free time aboard the Sigil. From the time they woke up in the morning until very late in the evening, their days were planned out. The shift from Recruit to Apprentice hadn’t really effected any change on Ceril’s daily routine: exercise first, then breakfast, then class for a few hours, then lunch, then more class, the personal study time.

  By the time it was all over, it was early evening, and he felt like he simply could not fit any more information into his head. Even though there was technically a curfew, no one paid attention to it.

  This one freedom—study time—was where the three classes of Charons were different. Ceril was genuinely shocked at how different the students acted just a few months after switching from Recruit status to Apprentice. The three classes began to act like cliques, and there was very little overlap between them.

  Soldiers generally saw fit to study their actual lessons just enough to get by. The majority of their time was spent with Bryt, an incredibly small and frail-looking man who gave them rudimentary combat training. Medics spent a great deal of time with their books, but for the most part, their time was spent in a lab somewhere with their mentor, Howser—who always looked just a little too young when she was around Roman or Bryt. The scholarly Recruits really hadn’t really spent any time with their mentor. They were told that she was on a mission and would be back as soon as she was able.

  Because of her absence, Ceril and the other scholar Apprentices tended to band together. With no mentor to direct him, Ceril spent what time he had in the observation deck at the top of the Sigil.

  Ceril had known from the first day aboard that he would love that room. He could stand at the railing for hours and watch the strange blur that enveloped the ship, reflecting onto the plants in their troughs. The garden in the center was his favorite part, though. On nights when he became fed up with academic exercises, he made his way to the observation deck and knelt among the plants. They were watered and tended by automated systems, so there was no need for a groundskeeper, but Ceril liked to have his hands in the dirt. He would weed the garden by hand and make sure they had enough water. Much of what he did was redundant and amounted to just moving some dirt from one place to another, but it made him happy.

  Plus it reminded him of Gramps.

  Tonight, though, Ceril was too tired to play in the dirt. He made his way to the highest tier of observation decks, and he leaned over the railing to watch hyperspace color everything a haunting orange. It felt tropical, yet cold somehow. The blur’s illumination had the tendency to make things feel a bit off, and it had taken most of the Recruits some time to get used to it. As he looked around, he could see a few of the other scholars making their way around the various levels of the deck. He thought he could see Saryn a level or two below him.

  He was surprised at how close the two of them had become, actually. She had seemed so odd at first. He wrote that off to her being from Yagh. All of the Yaghian Recruits were a little odd.

  Ceril raised his hand to wave to her, and a large, hair hand wrappe
d itself around his wrist. He tried to turn around, but he couldn’t. Not without breaking his wrist. Ceril looked at the hand, and if he hadn't known better, he would have assumed someone wearing a fur glove was assaulting him. Only one person on the Sigil was that hairy.

  And then, as though confirming Ceril’s suspicion, Ethan Triggs spoke. “Nice spot you’ve got up here, noob.”

  “Yeah,” Ceril said. “Great place to be alone.” He tried to pull his arm away, but he was held too tightly to get loose.

  “Then why are you waving at your girlfriend?” The voice was meaty. Not an unintelligent kind of meaty, though. There was too much enunciation, and that made it dangerous. “I suppose when you mean alone, you just mean…alone.” His voice dropped to a whisper, and Ceril was simultaneously disgusted and creeped out.

  Ceril turned his head, and all he could see was Ethan Triggs lording over him. Now, Ceril wasn't small. But he wasn't really the biggest person on the ship. An argument could be made that Ethan actually was.

  At six-eight, he was the alpha male of the solider Apprentices, an upperclassman who had yet to begin his Rites. What made Ethan scary was that he had the brains to back up his brawn, or at least enough to keep himself out of trouble and in his superiors’ good graces. He was also charismatic enough to warrant having his own lackeys. Two of whom were, at that moment, behind him.

  “Let me go, Ethan,” Ceril said.

  Ethan twisted Ceril’s arm a little, then shrugged and said, “Nah. Why would I do something like that?”

  This was not the first time that Ethan had given Ceril a hard time since he had come aboard the Inkwell Sigil. Ethan had almost broken Ceril’s nose on his first day as a Recruit, and every few weeks in the corridors, Ethan would do something else to bully Ceril. Sometimes it would be a snarky remark about Ceril’s weight or intelligence, other times, the hulk would just slam Ceril into the wall, chuckle, and walk away. But it was constant and regular. And it went beyond the bit of classist rivalry between the soldiers and the other disciplines—Ethan had targeted Ceril since day one. The classist rivalry was only part of it.