“What the hell is going on here?” she asked, her spiritual demeanor slipping. “This isn’t basic knives, Seekers! If you lose your weapon, you don’t start slapping and pinching like…”

Callahan stopped in mid sentence. She looked at the scratches on my cheek, and then at Gloria. Gloria froze under her glare.

Gloria looked stricken with guilt or something like it for about half of a second, then she stiffened and squared her shoulders off, proud as ever. Callahan continued to stare, and I wondered how she could stand up under that kind of attention. It wasn’t even directed at me and I felt like wilting.

Callahan said something so guttural and visceral sounding that it could only be swearing, though I didn’t know the language, and spit. Gloria’s eyes went wide and her face went through several contortions of pain as she collapsed onto the floor.

“The God of Pain is a jealous god,” Callahan said. “Deal with it.”

Callahan’s spit did that? I thought, before I realized Gloria was clutching her arm that I’d smashed with my staff when I’d knocked her into the wall.

Callahan hadn’t inflicted anything… I had. Gloria was just now reacting to it. She had been cheating, I realized… that was what the look of guilt had been about. She’d prayed for protection from pain, or the determination to overcome it or something like that, and possibly some other help as well.

“Do you need healing?” Callahan asked me.

“I… um… don’t know,” I said. I didn’t have a lot of experience with cuts, and it was hard to judge the severity of a wound when my body was a map of pain equal to many much worse injuries. “Will this stop on its own?”

“Before temple services are concluded,” she said.

“I think I’ll be okay,” I decided. I would have to go to the healing center after class… if I showed up for dinner with unhealed injuries Amaranth would not be happy… but as long as I wasn’t in any danger, I thought she’d likely approve of me toughing it out when I was learning so much.

“As you were, then, my sisters,” Callahan said, clasping her hands together and bowing. She looked to be very honestly pleased. That might have had as much to do with the way she’d dropped Gloria with a simple act of profanity as it did anything I had done, but she couldn’t exactly be displeased with me.

I’d fought on without complaining against a cheating opponent and turned the tables on her, I’d taken a bleeding wound in a mock combat class and decided to stay.

Once the shock of pain from the scratches was wearing off, I took a few moments to evaluate what had happened to my hand when I grabbed Gloria and her blessing-infused skin. I could take a few moments, because it was going to take Gloria a few moments more. She wasn’t giving up… she was trying to prop herself up, preparatory to actually standing, I thought. I stood back and let her. I thought there was a little pinkness on my fingers, and there was a little tenderness when I flexed them.

It could have been a bit of a problem with holding the staff, but it was pretty small compared to everything else. The fact that I even hefted my staff and stood upright meant I was toughing out much worse pain.

Gloria got herself up to the point where she was kneeling on one knee. She looked at me, and I really couldn’t read anything in her expression except defiance, though if it was me or the pain I couldn’t tell. It would have been so easy for me to keep her on the ground at that point, but as satisfying as it might have been, it wouldn’t help me any.

Well, it would be another theoretical IOU… but I wasn’t counting on anything coming from that. I wasn’t doing any of this for that man. I was doing it for me, and because Amaranth wanted it, and because I’d promised Callahan. I was doing it for Callahan more so than him. The fact that Callahan could shatter the protections of Gloria’s faith with a profane gesture was perhaps one of those things that in a sane world would have been a giant flashing warning sign, but on the other hand it was possible that Gloria’s divine magic was just not that strong. She seemed single-minded in her devotion, but I supposed that could be a sign of being insecure in her faith as anything else.

Gloria had not progressed beyond getting up on one knee, but she was looking a lot steadier. Her eyes were closed, and she was breathing slowly and evenly. She opened her eyes and looked up at me. I fought the urge to look away.

“For the record,” she said, “I do not think I did anything objectionable by using the gifts I have been given to deal with the pain I knew I would receive.”

“I’m not going to argue about that,” I said. Something popped into my head, and I rejected my first impulse, which was to swallow it. “I was winning anyway.”

“It is not a competition,” she said. “The… the object of the exercise isn’t to win.”

“Right, so it doesn’t matter that I was doing that,” I said. “I mean, if it did matter, I’d still be beating you right now.”

“It seemed to be a little more back and forth than that,” she said. I really couldn’t argue that, so I just nodded. Something popped into my head.

“Do you remember asking me if I was related to ‘Brimstone’ Blaise?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“You said you were not.”

“I didn’t think I was,” I said. “I guess she just didn’t like to talk about her old calling that much.”

“Does she know she’s related to demonspawn?”

“I’d guess she did, since she raised me for the last nine years,” I said. “She’s my grandmother, apparently.”

Gloria’s eyes widened very briefly, but then she said, “I suppose I would not admit to being a paladin if I were bringing up someone like you.”

It took me a moment to figure out how to react to that, and what I figured out was that I didn’t need to react to it. I didn’t care about my grandmother and her pride or shame that much. I couldn’t help smiling. I didn’t know how Amaranth would take me throwing little barbs at Gloria… well, that wasn’t true. I had a pretty fair guess how she would feel about it… but it wasn’t like I was actually insulting the girl. I was just telling her things that she probably didn’t actually want to hear.

It could be argued that this would be doing her a favor in the long run, and Steff would probably agree it was a step up from pining over her. The little bit of satisfaction I felt from realizing I’d stung her and she’d missed with her retort was making me feel a little better all over.

“Do you… are you ready to go again?” I asked.

“Will you allow me to retrieve my weapon, or will you strike me down as soon as I get to my feet?” she asked.

“You think I’m waiting for you to stand up just so I can slam you into the ground before you do anything?” I asked. I felt like I should have been insulted, but I was feeling kind of increasingly weirdly giddy. I laughed. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but… I’m just not that patient.”

She nodded, and then slowly got to her feet. She picked up her sword. It took her both arms to raise it. I stood back while she gave it a few test swings. I waited until she nodded to me, and then I let her make the first move.

I’d like to be able to say that without her divine protection, Gloria was no match for me and I was able to knock her down again and again without ever giving up a hit in return. Possibly if I’d kept whamming her, that would have been true. I thought about doing just that… it would have been legitimate, I figured, as I would need to practice that kind of thing on the fly, but there were other things I needed to practice more. Messing around with enchantments came naturally to me. Fighting did not.

So I fought. We fought. Gloria was slow and shaky at first, and I gave her some room to figure out how to cope with that. I didn’t expect any points for being charitable… in fact, I kept expecting her to accuse me of toying with her or mocking her, though she did not say another word the whole time. But if she wasn’t fighting me back, I wasn’t going to learn anything from fighting her… so I gave her a chance to fight. I learned a few things that way.

One was that just as the whole length of the staff was its striking surface, it was also all handle. I couldn’t just hold it one way the whole time and use it effectively. Some grips worked better than others. There might have been a right way to hold it in a given situation, but the situation kept changing.

It wasn’t changing all that quickly, though, because both Gloria and I were already hurting badly. We weren’t exactly moving in slow motion, but neither one of us could keep up a sustained effort.

Another thing I learned was that it really matter a whole lot what Gloria did if I actually connected, but if I didn’t then I regretted putting so much force behind it. She learned that one pretty quickly, too, and she was fairly fast and spry in short bursts. I had a feeling that if I got paired off against her again it would turn into an acrobatics routine. I decided I’d avoid that if I could… Callahan was right about Gloria learning, too. I could see her thinking during the lulls between our bouts of activity.

As those rest periods became longer and more often, I started to worry that we were going to get Callahan’s attention again. I glanced around the room and saw that we already did, but she across the floor, nodding in approval. I also realized that about a third of the class was on the floor, and everybody who was still up and about was moving and fighting like we were. Some of them were more active, but a lot were slower and wobblier.

I didn’t think that I had a particularly high tolerance for pain, but it was possible some of the people who were out of the fight had fought better opponents… or they were just less motivated to keep fighting. At the point when I’d been on the floor, I could definitely have seen the high points of curling up into a tiny little ball and giving up.

A third thing I learned was that being aggressive with my blocking was better than just trying to put a passive barrier between myself and the sword. It meant I had to adjust my grip less, and the results could be a lot better than just canceling out one of Gloria’s attacks.

The class wore on, and it wore us down. I couldn’t say how many times I knocked Gloria off her feet because I wasn’t counting. What good would it have done? If I kept my own count then I didn’t trust the man’s offer… which I didn’t, but if I didn’t trust his offer then it didn’t really matter what the count was.

A sudden stinging pain in my face made me cry out, and I had a moment of wondering what the hell had happened when I realized that the rest of the pain had disappeared… and so had the staff in my hand. Gloria suddenly stood straighter. All around us, people were getting to their feet. It seemed Callahan had canceled all the mocked weapons at once.

“The God of Pain has departed,” Callahan announced. “We’ll be meeting back here on Thursday and we’re going to start really mixing things up. Just so everyone knows, I’m doing a workshop or conference or some other excuse early next week, so no class next Tuesday. Emo Kid!”

I had been wondering if I should shake hands with or say something to Gloria before Callahan called me over, but I hurried across the room, through the throng of students who were going to retrieve their actual weapons.

“Good effort,” she said. “Are you going to do the same thing on Thursday? Because I’ve got a feeling you forget things faster than you learn them.”

“I… yeah,” I said. “I mean, yes, I’m going to do it Thursday.”

“Good,” she said. “And the week after that, I hope. When I get back into town, I’m either going to be in a really good mood or a fucking catastrophic one. You’re going to have some time to do some remedial reading over the weekend. I really strongly suggest you do it.”

I nodded.

“And you tell Johnson I’ll overlook it this time,” she added, “but if I don’t see her curvy ass in class Thursday, I’m going to have to mark her absent. Now go do something about that face.”

Wednesday: You don’t find out what Callahan’s doing. That would be too easy.

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She lashed out and I lashed back, shoving up and forward to catch her blade and knock it back. For lack of any better plan, I just kept moving forward. She ended up on her ass, though she scrambled sideways and got herself up on her feet before I figured out what to do next. Hit her, obviously, but I wasn’t really holding the staff in a swingable position.

Even without magic guidance, it really wasn’t that hard to figure out how to put a stick I was holding right in front of me in between myself and a sword blade. Yes, there definitely was something to be said for a staff over a sword when it came to blocking… I just needed to work on striking.

I adjusted my grip a little bit to try to get a little more length for swinging, and then a little more. I didn’t have the room to hold it near the end and swing it like a giant sword, but trying to shove Gloria around or just bop her on the hands with the ends of the staff wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I stopped sliding the staff up when I had one hand right around the center… my only thought was to sort of split the difference, but it felt strangely workable. I had control of the unwieldy weapon, I had enough length to hit with, I still had it in front of me.

It was a bit like holding a sword with a giant hilt.

That insight popped into my head right as Gloria went into another flurry of attacks. It helped. I resisted the urge to hide behind the staff like I’d been doing, and tried to block more actively. I was stronger than Gloria… I should be able to do more than just put something between her blade and me.

I found myself wishing I’d paid more attention to the stickfighting book Callahan had assigned to me. I probably would’ve figured out how to hold the staff sooner, and maybe I’d have a better idea of how to parry than just batting at her weapon.

Hitting her weapon was an effective way of keeping it away from me, but it wasn’t the goal. I had a longer weapon than her and even if I didn’t have the room to swing it, I could still reach out.

The next time Gloria swung her sword at me, I batted it aside from the inside, and then sort of popped the staff forward almost like it was a giant cue stick. It was an awkward shift, but moving my hands on the staff and vice-versa seemed a lot more natural without the defensive spells influencing how I held it. It worked, too. The butt of the staff… or head, or whatever the end that was facing her was called… slammed into her chest and she fell backwards, spinning onto her side and hitting a big guy with a big battleaxe in the legs. He went wobbly, but kept his feet, though he took a whip lash to the cheek from his opponent while he was distracted. He cried out and then charged the whip-wielder.

Gloria was still sorting herself out. My staff was still kind of extended in my grasp, so I swung it down like a hammer. She got the sword up, kind of, but it didn’t do much good. I watched as the staff hit it, I heard and felt it and I didn’t stop swinging. I heard and felt the impact of the staff on Gloria’s head, too… even though there was no apparent wound left behind, the illusionary magic still gave a sickeningly wet crack.

Gloria grunted a little, grabbed her sword, and scuttled back into the gap the axeman had left, where she retook her feet.

Something was very badly wrong. I couldn’t really quantify these things, but I was pretty sure if somebody had clobbered one of my breasts with the end of a quarterstaff with enough force to knock me off my feet, I would have at least said “ow”… and that was to say nothing of the fact that I was pretty sure that I’d cracked her in the head with one of those “definitely fatal” blows Callahan had talked about. How much pain had she just shrugged off?

Had messing around with the nature of its enchantments screwed up my phantasmal weapon? It seemed within the realm of possibility… the thing was at its core just a bundle of spells, and I’d ripped one out. On an impulse, I pulled the staff back up at my own face with just enough force to make me wince and use slightly less force.

It still stung like I’d just hit myself in the forehead with a wooden pole. I could imagine Gloria stoically overcoming something like that, but I’d hit her much harder… was the pain not scaling up right? I didn’t really have time to investigate the intricacies of the situation… Gloria’s sword was flashing forward, right at my stomach. I tried get step back and get my staff in the way, but I wasn’t quick enough: her sword slipped in just to side of my navel right as I batted it away.

The pain was… pain. Bright and burning. The God of Pain was safe on his throne. I not only failed to slay him, I bowed before him… and Gloria took the opportunity to slam the pommel of her sword against my skull. I crumpled forward. I didn’t so much keep hold of my staff as land on top of it. Chalk up another point for having a smooth, blunt weapon…

Gloria’s blade kept slashing downwards. I felt it pass through me once, twice, a third time… every time it spread bright flares of pain through my body. She didn’t stop after three blows, it just became impossible to count. The pain of each non-wound stuck around, adding to the ones that had come before. There was pain and pain and more pain, and it wasn’t stopping. Each time I tried to rise or move, there came a harder, deeper blow somewhere new.

Well, Callahan couldn’t accuse me of not getting into the spirit of the lesson.

Ignoring the pain wasn’t possible. Fighting it didn’t seem like an option… how did you fight something that was everywhere inside you, stronger than you, and getting stronger all the time?

Gloria’s arm would get tired, but what kind of shape would I be in by then?

I slumped over onto my side. It wasn’t intention, but it was sort of an improvement. I wasn’t on top of my staff any more. I could feel it next to my arm… it was an effort to remember what it was that I was feeling, but I clung tight to the thought of my staff. It was hard, but not as hard as I’d thought. The staff wasn’t pain. That made it a happy thought by definition.

I tried to picture where it was, imagining how it would be positioned based on what I thought its angle was. This wasn’t anything like part of a plan… it was just reaching out and holding on. But, as I suppose frequently happens when someone realizes that the thing they’re holding onto is a weapon, a plan sort of presented itself.

I went as still as I could. I jerked pretty badly when the sword went through me, but I was being stabbed a lot less than I had been. I didn’t try to fight the pain, just sort of go with it. It was there. It was real enough for me to feel it. I couldn’t do anything about it. I held onto my impression of the staff. I tried to find some kind of rhythm or pattern in Gloria’s blows, but she wasn’t being the least bit methodical. All I could do was wait until just after she stabbed me and before she stabbed me again.

I grabbed for the staff. My hand hit and slid off, but I had a real piece of luck… the staff didn’t roll away. In fact, it didn’t move at all. I wrenched myself up a bit even as Gloria stabbed me right through the head. My hand closed in on the end of the shaft and I yanked it up off the floor. I heard Gloria crying out in surprise as she fell down again. My vision was red, all bright red, but I focused on that sound and started flailing around towards it. Maybe I couldn’t hurt her, but I could hit her, I could knock her down and push her around. It was easy to tell when I connected, and I just kept pounding, kept hammering away, kept bringing the staff down until I felt it hitting floor instead of her.

My vision had dimmed but I still couldn’t see, and that was when I realized that my eyes were shut. I opened them, and found myself looking at Gloria, who’d backed up against a wall to get out of my swings. She was standing on her feet, looking a little shaky but oddly composed.

If she was hurting any, it didn’t show one bit.

I fixed my grip on the staff, holding it out in front of me so I could strike with it, at her or her sword. The pain was still there… still everywhere. The explosive burst of action had taken the edge off of it somewhat, but it hadn’t gone away. I felt like my whole body was made up of wounds, dozens of cuts and slashes overlaid on top of each other. I wanted to lay down… fall over, really… but that wouldn’t make the pain go away, and would in fact only lead to more.

The only way to mitigate the pain was to keep fighting. The only way to prevent more was to do it well.

Gloria was eyeing me carefully. She had to know that if I could keep hitting her I could keep her at staff length, even if it didn’t do much more than tickle her. If I couldn’t hit her, though… if I screwed up, if I gave her an opening… she’d be on me again. She could go for my guts, or take my legs out from under me, or do any number of other things.

So don’t screw up, I told myself. I remembered my earlier thought. Could I possibly work an enchantment under the circumstances? Probably not on a real weapon, but the phantasmal staff’s magic was quick and responsive. It took nothing more than a thought, a mental twitch, to reach out and touch it, to take hold of it. That mental connection made me feel more confident in holding the physical weapon.

While keeping my eyes locked with Gloria’s… trying not to give away what I was doing with my face… I took stock. The staff’s properties were way different from the knife I was used to working with in class, but there was something in there that felt promising. Something hard and brutal and strangely satisfying, when I wrapped my attention around it. I didn’t know what an armourer would have called this property, but I suppose it could be summed up as “whamminess“.

Yeah… that was something I could use.

I lifted up the staff like I was going to go for an overhead swing. As I did, Gloria lunged in for another abdominal thrust. I threw as much energy as I could into the staff and brought it down around, swinging at her from the side. She went flying into the adjoining wall and bounced off. Her sword flew in a similar but separate path. I had the presence of mind to slam my foot down on its blade while it was still clattering on the ground.

Maybe that was an underhanded move, but she’d stepped on my weapon first. She could try to throw me off of it, but I was a bit stronger than she was.

Gloria got to her feet slowly. I let her stand, because I had her sword and I was interested in seeing how she moved. She was moving slower now, and clutching her arm where the staff had hit it, though she still seemed more shaken than pained by the impacts.

“You…” she said. It sounded like an accusation, or part of one.

I didn’t know how to respond, since she hadn’t given me anything I could refute, so I just kicked her sword back a bit and then stepped on it again, keeping my staff towards her.

“You are cheating,” she said.

“I’m not sure our teacher would agree,” I said. “Or care.”

“Bringing your filthy magic into an honest fight,” she said.

“We’re fighting with magic weapons,” I said. “I could have just as easily brought a staff of whamming in with me.”

“You didn’t, though,” she said.

“And what did you bring?” I asked her. “If you aren’t buffed on something, you’d be feeling a lot worse already.”

“What? Don’t you dare compare…” she said, but whatever I wasn’t supposed to compare was lost as she threw herself at me with an inarticulate shriek.

My new calm and analytical style deserted me. I dropped my staff in surprise, though I kept my foot planted on her sword. She grabbed the staff before it hit the ground and tried pummeling me with it, though she too close to use it effectively. I caught hold of it and tried to wrench it away… she let go and it slipped from my hand, sailing into somebody else’s fight.

Unarmed, she punched me in the face, then clawed at me with her fingernails. I felt four burning trails digging into my cheek. She couldn’t actually injure me… in fact, her unaugmented hand and nails would work against me almost exactly the same way the “pain only” mockeries would… but switching from a phantasmal weapon to a flesh-and-blood hand had to be some kind of violation or at least faux pas.

I grabbed her wrist, then her other one when she tried to hit me with that one.

“How about a time out?” I asked. “I’ll give you back your sword if you let me get my staff, and then we’ll go back to trying to hurt each other as much as we can.”

She spat at me, but I barely noticed. Her skin was tingling weirdly underneath my hand… and then it burned. At the same time, I became aware of a wet trickle down my cheek. I let go, stepping back and touching my cheek. I could feel the scratches she’d made, and my fingertips came away red.

“What the hell are you?” I asked, though that was probably not the best figure of speech.

Friday: You don’t think it would really be that simple, do you?

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I wondered if they were all conscientious objectors to the pseudoreligious trappings for some reason, or if Callahan had set up some other exercise for students she thought didn’t need any help “slaying the God of Pain”, or if the dwarves had all retreated en masse for reasons having nothing to do with the class.

Even with some of the bulkier bodies missing from the floor, space was very much at a premium. As more pairs of fighters got their weapons mocked and got down to it, the area available to each pair shrank. Already people were bumping into each other and narrowly avoiding errant swings from their neighbors as Gloria and I looked for a spot to stake out.

For a moment I thought this was poor planning… or reckless apathy… on Callahan’s part, but then I realized that she would want everyone to be bunched up right on top of their opponents, where even the cautious and the quick would not be able to avoid getting hit.

Footwork would not play much of a role in the day’s lesson… the object of the exercise was to keep standing, not to keep moving… to fight on in the face of pain, not necessarily to fight well. It would be dirty, it would be ugly, and above all it would be painful, which was likely to be the point.

Gloria was surveying the floor with a decided lack of her usual determination… it seemed like she was looking for a good spot and finding none. I knew that Gloria had learned to wield a sword by watching her brothers and imitating them by herself. It made sense that she wouldn’t be any good at fighting in close quarters… she wasn’t really used to having an opponent in front of her, much less people all around her.

I wasn’t good at fighting under any circumstances, so at least I wouldn’t be on unfamiliar ground.

“Come on,” I said, heading for the edge of the room. If we fought next to a wall, at least there’d be one less side to worry about bumping into people on. “Let’s just get out of everybody’s way.”

I didn’t see Gloria moving, or have any sense that she was following me so I looked over my shoulder… actually remembering to stop moving my legs before I stopped watching where I was going for once. She was still rooted to the spot, looking at me like she wasn’t sure she trusted me enough to run me through in a spot that I picked out.

Well, if that was what I was going to get for trying to be nice I’d just have to look out for myself. I made a beeline for the far corner of the room, then turned around with my back to it. Gloria was still standing there by the mockboxes… I was out on the floor and had my weapon ready. She’d have to come to me, and she’d have to fight with other melees going on all around her… or she could be the one who got yelled at by Callahan.

It didn’t come to that, though… Gloria shook her head like she was trying to shake away a bad influence, very visibly swallowed, and then stalked across the floor towards me. This time she offered no bow or other mark of respect in lieu of a prayer.

“I suppose you would be used to keeping your back to the wall,” she said.

“Not really,” I said. “Not in a fight, anyway… I have spent most of my life trying to stay out of other people’s way, but I haven’t spent that much time working on staying alive.”

As we squared off, I quickly found out that there were drawbacks to where I’d chosen to make my stand. Gloria needed a little room to swing her sword, but I needed more room to swing my staff. I was okay with the basic stance… holding the shaft with both hands centered around the middle… but I’d be banging it into the walls if I tried to swing it like a club, which was really my best bet when it came to inflicting pain. There had to be ways to attack with it effectively without holding it near the end and whomping, or jabbing with it like a pitchfork… something would work better if it actually were my pitchfork… but none of them popped into my head while I was standing there holding the stick up in front of me.

It was a great stance for defense. Gloria came at me without another word, though even I could see the moment on her face when she decided to attack me. The sneer on her face startled me. Luckily, my reaction was to bring the staff up… with the defensive enchantments helping guide my movement, I easily blocked her overhead swing, and the quick slash that followed. With the corner at my back, I was pretty much a fortress.

It looked like Gloria had accuracy enchantments… or rather, blessings… laid on her sword. That was just a guess. If it had been arcane rather than divine, I could have told in a few seconds if I got my hand on the thing, but that wasn’t an option with the original article and I wasn’t sure how it would work to try to read the enchantments on the mocked copy. But when I watched her movements closely, it seemed like there was something guiding the blade. Her swings started out sort of loose and sloppy but ended up focused and true at the point where my staff intercepted them.

It made sense… swords were a lot better for that sort of thing than staves. A blade embodied the idea of “weapon” much more concretely than something that was basically a big stick, and accuracy was a property of weapons. I vaguely remembered hearing that swords and arrows were considered the archetypal weapons by armoury enchanters… possibly I’d picked that up in my enhancements lab, though my attention had a tendency to wander when weapons were the subject.

Staves, on the other hand, were seen as defensive… at a practical level, they were better for blocking than killing. It was certainly harder to inflict an outright fatal wound with a staff, but for the purpose of the day’s exercise there were no outright fatal wounds, just painful ones. When it was enchanted enough to be practically unbreakable and wielded with enough strength, though, there was something to be said for a staff over a sword.

My weapon was all handle and all striking surface. I just needed to figure out how to use it. As much as it suited me to sit there blocking all day, Callahan had made it clear that anyone not getting into the spirit of the exercise would be helped along. That… and not anything that the man in my dream had offered me… was why I needed to figure out a better strategy. I’d take some hits while I was figuring things out, but it would be no different than being hit with a non-magic weapon: however much it hurt, I’d get over it.

I fended off a few more attacks from Gloria. Behind her, the floor was filling up. Most people had tried to grab what looked like open floor, avoiding the walls… but they were finding themselves just as boxed in, and now the pack was moving towards us. I decided to wait until she had more to worry about than me before trying anything really desperate or fancy. Instead, I lashed out at Gloria’s sword arm with one end of the pole after one of her attacks.

I hit more hilt than hand, and realized afterwards that if I’d really put some oomph behind it and followed through I still could have rattled her bones quite a bit. I’d been too hesitant, too tentative… too delicate about it. As it was, I barely threw her off her stride and took too long getting myself squared back up again. She took advantage of me being off-balance… mentally even more than physically… to pull her sword back and lunge at my stomach.

My staff’s magic saved me… my reflexes weren’t enough, but it all but snapped into position by itself. I batted her sword blade down with more force than I’d used trying to attack her. The impact jarred me… her grip loosened for a moment and she stepped back to adjust her hold on the hilt. Again it occurred to me seconds too late that I should have followed through there.

Why was I missing so many opportunities the time I was determined to succeed? Other melee classes hadn’t gone like this… had they? Or was it a case that I hadn’t even been paying enough attention to know I’d missed an opportunity? The principle that Callahan had espoused regarding knowledge might have applied: in studying fighting, what I was learning was how badly I sucked.

No, not how badly… how. In what ways. Fighting ability wasn’t a quantity, a numerical score. Standing around on a battlefield waving a weapon wasn’t a magic ritual that made you a better fighter. Even practicing specific movements that other, better fighters made would only take you so far. It was almost scientific: you figured out what worked and what didn’t work, and why.

Of course, like any such “science”, the rules you derived from it couldn’t stand up to repeated contact with reality and trying to rely on them too much would likely result in embarrassment or death, which would probably be why people also talked about “fighting instincts”, and why even the best fighters did occasionally die.

But thinking about martial skill as being like a kind of science appealed to me. I tried whipping at Gloria’s hand with the end of the staff again, this time more forcefully. She was learning, too… she withdrew her hand quickly, stepping back and around the swing and then lashing out at my arm from the side. That was a bit harder to block than the last one had been, but the fact that I needed to twist around to get the staff up to block it made it easier to follow through.

I heard Gloria grunt as I batted her sword out wide. I didn’t waste a moment ruing when I realized I should have smashed her in the face before she recovered. I was figuring things out. One of the things was that the staff’s magic was working against me… it would have been easier to just step a bit to the side and move my arm out of the way, but the instincts of the defensive weapon were stronger than my own reflexes. Could I do something about them? I didn’t want to have to figure out if what it wanted to do was the correct thing every time Gloria came after me, but that meant either following its lead every time or ignoring it every time.

Or silencing it altogether… I was, to some degree, an enchanter. Battlefield enchantment was considered a high-level discipline. I knew it was possible in general… there were whole fighting styles devoted to combining swordplay with spells that could be practiced and drilled until they could be cast in an instant to enhance an attack. I honestly wasn’t sure if MU offered courses in that kind of thing, and if it did then I would be far from qualified to take them.

But messing with the characteristics of a phantom weapon would probably be easier… being unreal, they would have less “weight” to them. It only took a tiny effort to feel the magic of the thing in my hands… the thing was magic, after all. I could sense the eagerness of the defensive spells. They were more complex than the sort of property enhancement I was used to. There was no way I could have woven them myself, but how hard would it be to suppress it or rip it out entirely?

For that matter, could I throw a little accuracy into my phantasmal staff? Sustaining that sort of thing for the duration of a swing would probably be no problem. Doing it in a way that didn’t totally fuck up the swing past the point that I was gaining any benefit from it would be another.

I blocked another attack from Gloria. Callahan had made it sound like there weren’t going to be any pauses or breaks in the entire period, which meant I wasn’t going to get much time or room to do anything complicated in. I made a wild swing at Gloria, forcing her to back into a big guy who was backing into her, and while she whirled halfway around out of reflex, I reached out down the pathways of magic I felt coursing between my hands, grabbed hold of the defensive spells, and ripped with all my mystical might.

I felt it giving way in a big way… too big, I thought at first. I felt the staff losing integrity inside my hands, saw it flicker and almost vanish. It snapped back into satisfyingly solid pseudoreality pretty quickly, though. In the instant after that, I realized that I’d just thrown away a pretty solid advantage.

The blue-tipped staff of defense had been almost as basic a magic weapon as you could find, especially compared to Gloria’s more elaborate holy blade. Now it was the most basic magic weapon you could find: a simple magic quarterstaff. A centuries-old wizard probably had better weapon enchantments on his staff of power than this thing did. It was now nothing more than a basically unbreakable stick for hitting people with.

It already felt more awkward in my hands. The way I’d been holding it before had felt so easy, so natural… now I wasn’t sure how to space my hands or what angle to hold it at. It was now very obvious that it had been the weapon’s preferences, not mine… what was that old enchanter’s saying about the trustworthiness of things that seemed to think for themselves? I didn’t suspect the staff was sinister, but just because something was well-intentioned didn’t mean it would be smart to rely on it.

Gloria looked at me like she could see the change. I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I made an effort to hold it like I’d been holding it before… it was a good position to defend from… and looked around the room. Callahan was looking at us. Her expression was as close to neutral as it probably got… she looked skeptical but not openly hostile. If she’d been watching, she would have just seen me making that wild swing and now she was watching to see what I would do next.

That meant it was time to figure out what exactly that was.

Monday: To the pain.

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In Which Two Is Weirdly Admired

“Steff!” I cried, dropping my mocked weapon and running over to her.

She was laid out on her back, still in her princess dress. She had blood trickling from her nose, a split lip, a purple bruise forming around her eye, and a big, ugly double knot swelling up on her head. She was badly dazed, if not actually unconscious. I couldn’t tell at a glance.

“Your friend’s fine,” Callahan said. “Just a bump on the head. Nothing that a simple Potion of Cure Getting All Up In My Face And Interfering With A Class Exercise won’t fix. Dhambizao, go form up with the others for testing.”

“Yes… ma’am,” Gloria said, glaring sullenly at me as she spoke. She stood there for a moment, and then walked around the crowd of other students and disappeared from sight.

Some of them were standing around talking like nothing was going on, but a good number of them seemed utterly bemused or even scared.

Me? I was angry… as much for Callahan’s utterly blasé attitude towards the whole thing as for the injuries she’d inflicted. I was so mad I didn’t even look at Callahan, for fear of what I’d do.

“What? You couldn’t just fucking restrain her?” I asked, keeping my eyes on Steff… but not on her face.

“This look like a Rope Use class to you?” Callahan replied. “If a student does something stupid, I put them down hard so they don’t have time to do something really stupid and make me put them down harder. Now, I’m going to be busy doing evaluations for the next hour. I don’t have anything else for you to do today, but if you’d rather stay and be the target dummy than get your friend’s head fixed, that’s your call.”

“Did you just take this job because you like beating the shit out of people?” I asked.

“Please, Emo Kid. There’s better paying jobs where I’d get to beat the shit of people more often than this one,” Callahan said. “I took this job because I hate seeing dumbass kids get themselves killed because they don’t know how to fight, and I love beating the shit out of people. Now get your friend out of here before I decide to send somebody else, and you and I can spend the rest of class working on a new nickname.”

I glared at her but there wasn’t really anything I could do. The waivers we’d signed for combat classes protected the instructors from consequences for pretty much everything but lasting harm.

Steff stirred and moaned. I looked and saw her eyes flutter and then find me. She smiled.

“Hey, you,” she said.

“Hey,” I said, returning the best smile I could manage.

“She… she stop the fight?” Steff asked.

“Kind of,” I said. “I won.”

Steff’s eyes bulged and she tried to sit up.

“How hard was I hit?” She groaned and grabbed her head, settling back down.

“Not hard enough if you’re flapping your cockslot already,” Callahan said. “Get the fuck out already. Johnson, I want to see you in my office at ten. Tonight. Emo Kid, I don’t want to see you at all until you’ve read five chapters of that book. If you’re not done by class Thursday, don’t show up.”

“Come on,” Steff said, using me to help pull herself up. “Let’s not antagonize Teacher any more.”

I helped Steff to her feet, and we headed off across the field. She kept wanting to drift sideways as we walked, and was leaning on me for stability.

“How do you stand walking so slow?” she asked after we’d left the field.

“I don’t, normally,” I said. “I’m walking slow for you.”

“I’m faster than you are,” she said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. She was a little out of it, it seemed.

She started laughing. I stopped us moving.

“Are you okay?”

“She wants to see me in her office,” Steff said. She was grinning drunkenly. “At ten. Tonight.”

“Steff, you can’t have sex with your teacher,” I said. “There’s got to be like seventeen different rules against that.”

“For her, maybe,” Steff said. “What are they gonna do to me, fire me? Anyway… all kinds of things two people can do that aren’t sex, and she’s got a waiver for most of the best ones.”

“A personal relationship’s a personal relationship,” I said. “If you’re going to her office for… one-on-one fun, I don’t think it matters if it’s actually sex or not.”

“Whatever,” Steff said. “It’s her job. Anyway, I have to ask Viktor but I think he’ll say yes. He’s been keeping me in the room at night lately and I think he’s starting to get frustrated. His playing’s been getting even worse, if you can believe that.”

“Steff, he’s not bad,” I said.

She snorted.

“Hon, I love you like air, but you’ve got no taste,” she said.

We started moving again.

“What happened, anyway? Weren’t you supposed to be changing?” I asked a while later.

“Yeah, but I didn’t get very far,” Steff said. “I decided to come back and make sure Callahan wasn’t getting me out of the way for a reason. How’s the back of my dress? Is it alright?”

“I can’t check without dropping you,” I said. I didn’t mention that she was dripping blood down the front of it. “But if there’s anything wrong, I’m sure Two will fix it.”

“Khersis Fuck, I love that weird little pseudowench,” Steff said. She even sounded a little drunk. “You know that?”

“I know,” I said. “Please don’t call her weird.”

“Sorry,” Steff said. “I don’t mean weird. I mean… weird. But good weird. We’re all weird. I want to get her a present. Let’s go to the bookstore and look for one.”

“Maybe after the healing center,” I said. “And the library.”

“I gave her a bottle of vanilla spray,” Steff said.

“I know you did,” I said, uncomfortable at the memory of Two smelling so much like delicious food. “Maybe next time a nice floral scent?”

“I just gave her it because I didn’t want it, and she was so happy she cried,” Steff said. “I want to give her a real present.” She stopped suddenly, and I almost tripped. “Hey! We should give her a party!”

“We should,” I agreed. “Seriously, Steff, let’s get you healed. How many times did Callahan hit you?”

“Only till I stopped moving,” Steff said. “I think she stomped my balls at least once after that.”

There’d been some changes in the healing center. There were signs posted everywhere reminding people that it was a secular sanctity-free zone, and to please conceal or check their holy symbols. Scrying orbs had been installed up near the ceiling, along with signs reporting that the area was monitored for our protection.

There were two people behind the desk, the middle-aged receptionist Yvette and a slightly younger man in a white shirt and tie. His eyes widened slightly when he saw me leading Steff towards them, while Yvette didn’t appear to have noticed us lurching across the anteroom at all. The man nudged her, and she looked at him uncomprehendingly while he pointed. He rotated her chair until she was facing us.

“You,” she said. She cackled. “Not your period again already?”

“I’m not here for me,” I said.

When we reached the counter, I noticed there was a sign on top of it, with the words facing the other side. It proclaimed that the front desk was to be staffed by two people at all times. Another sign, facing out, announced that visitors must use their own pens.

There was a staff roster that I’d never paid attention to on the back wall, behind the counter. It caught my eye because the top line had been covered with a sticker. It read “Acting Director: Morgan Yarrow.” Another one placed Lynette Havilland down with the staff healers.

I felt a moment of pity for her. She hadn’t impressed me in the slightest, and bore a good deal of the responsibility for what had happened to me the week before, but it was a very odd thing to realize that somebody had been demoted because of me.

Of course, it might have been temporary, pending an investigation or whatever. They probably would have had the sign altered if they expected the changes to last.

“Hello, my name is Ernst,” the man said, pulling out a form and a pen. “Do you request healing from the Magisterius University Gygax Memorial Healing Center?”

“Yes,” I said.

“If the patient’s able to respond, I need to hear it from, ah, her,” Ernst said.

“Sure,” Steff said. She giggled. “Why not?”

“Name?”

“Steff,” she said. “Steffain Johnson.”

“How’s that spelled?”

“J-O-H…”

“Never mind. Let’s see… nature of injuries?” he said, then looked at Steff. “Multiple contusions, split lip, cartilage damage and bleeding in nose,” he said, writing as he spoke. “Anything else?”

“Crushed testicles,” Steff added.

“Don’t be smart,” Yvette said.

“Crushed testicles,” Ernst echoed. “Cause of injury?”

“Is all this really necessary?” I asked. “When I was here before, they just wrote ‘foot’.”

“I’m not at liberty to comment on previous practices,” Ernst said. “Cause of injury, unarmed blunt trauma?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Steff said.

“Do you wish to report an assault?”

“It was combat class,” Steff said.

“Do you have any sensitivities or vulnerabilities?”

“Cold iron turns my skin green.”

“Please sign this waiver of liability and consent to treatment,” Ernst said, pulling out another form and pushing it across the desk towards Steff.

“I don’t have a pen,” Steff said.

Ernest looked at me.

“We came here from the combat field,” I said.

“I have a pen right here,” Yvette said, digging in her purse. Ernst put his hand on top of the bag to stop her.

“Then I need you to read the statement aloud for the monitors,” Ernst told Steff.

“This part at the bottom?” Steff asked.

“The whole thing. Please face the scrying orb and speak in a loud clear voice.”

Steff sighed and read off the dense legalese in her slightly slurred voice, made worse by her lip’s continued swelling.

“Thank you. One moment, please,” Ernst said. He did something under the desk, and a blond guy came out from the back with a wheelchair.

“I can walk,” Steff said. “Mack’ll help.”

“Please,” Ernst said, gesturing towards the chair. “Only patients are allowed in the treatment area.”

“Since when?” Steff asked.

“I’m not allowed to comment on our policy changes,” Ernst said.

“It’s okay,” I told Steff. “I’ll be right here.”

“You’ll have to wait for your friend outside,” Ernst said. “There’s no loitering in the healing center.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“I am not.”

“It’s a waiting room,” I pointed out.

“Yes, and it isn’t going anywhere,” he countered.

I sighed.

“I’ll see you outside in a few,” I told Steff.

“Bye bye, sweetie,” she said, waving as the blond healer wheeled her into the back.

“Bye,” I said after her.

“Thank you, and have a healthful day,” Ernst said, giving me a curt nod.

I waited outside for what seemed like at least fifteen minutes, maybe even twenty.

“Everything go okay?” I asked Steff when she finally came out.

“Yeah,” she said. “They healed me quick, but then they checked for dizziness and had a diviner go over me. I thought they were going to stick a divining rod in my ass before they let me go.” She laughed. “I was disappointed when they didn’t. You know, I used to blow Andrew every time I had him, but he wasn’t interested.”

“Probably wasn’t allowed,” I said. “They seem to be running a lot tighter ship now.”

“So, did you say you actually beat Gloria?” Steff asked.

“Into the ground,” I said, a little ruefully. It was hard for me to picture myself. I didn’t really want to dwell on the image of her, writhing on the pole like that.

“I can’t believe Jill pulled that shit,” Steff said. “What was she thinking?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That whole thing was really unnecessary.”

“Oh, it was totally necessary,” Steff said. “But Glory?”

“Gloria,” I corrected. “And she’s not… well, she’s never been that bad, before.”

“You’re deluding yourself, hon,” Steff said, shaking her head. “I get the hotness of her, but she’s not worth it. Just masturbate over her image, like any sane person would do, and forget about the real person.”

That wasn’t an argument I wanted to have, so I looked for one that I did.

“Anyway, what do you mean, it was necessary?” I asked.

“You’re never going to learn how to fight if you’re not willing to fight in the first place,” Steff said.

“I was learning,” I said. “It must have done some good because I won.”

“If you won, it’s because your huge advantage in strength beat her small advantage in skill,” Steff said. “What if she’d had more numbers on her side? Ranged weapons? What if she’d used spells… or divine power?”

“Well, in that case I might as well not learn to fight at all,” I said. “In a real fight she would have signed the hell out of me, or held me, and then just killed me when I was helpless.”

“Oh… Mack,” Steff said, shaking her head.

“What?” I asked. “It’s true. I’m dead meat.”

“It’s always two steps forward, two steps back with you, isn’t it?” she said. “You’re still better off knowing how to fight if it gives you a chance to put someone down before they can get a prayer off in your face, and anyway, if you ever learn to overcome that stuff…”

“How do you learn to ‘overcome’ divine power?” I asked. “That’s the power of the fucking gods, Steff.”

“Yeah, and you need to figure out how to resist it.”

“That’s pretty close to blasphemy,” I said. “Divine power burns me because it’s supposed to.”

“And you’re supposed to fight it off,” Steff said.

“That is blasphemy,” I said.

“Oh, shit,” Steff said. “We’d better stop, before the gods stop liking you so much.”

“I’m not having this conversation,” I said.

“Okay, fine,” Steff said. “You probably shouldn’t focus on too many things at a time, and right now you’re working on physical defense. But even if you don’t want to talk about it, I’m going to have a conversation about this with Amaranth, and maybe Two. She’s still reading up on demons.”

“I wish she wouldn’t,” I said. “Do you know why she tried to summon that one?”

“Amaranth does,” Steff said. “They won’t tell me.” She shrugged. “But, Khersis, Mack… if all the dark powers were pushovers like you are, there wouldn’t be any demonhunters. There’s got to be something you can do to bolster your resistance.”

“Look, I said I don’t want to talk about this. Let’s just go to the library, okay?” I said. “I’ve got to read five chapters of this stupid handbook for Callahan before next class and it isn’t like I don’t have any real coursework to do.”

“Oh, you are so getting your ass kicked on Thursday,” Steff said. “And I am so going to watch.”

The most natural way to hold it seemed to be two-handed, like a staff, but that seriously seemed to cut down the reach, and I didn’t know how to bring the points to bear when I was holding it sideways like that.

Also, I felt really nervous about my hands. I mean, they were right there where Gloria could hit them, and then I’d be disarmed and slightly more defenseless.

Of course, what would happen if she did disarm me? She’d “killed” me before. It could hurt like hell, but I’d get over it. Anyway, if Callahan saw me fighting and losing and decided to chuck me out, would that actually be any worse than if I just refused to fight?

Actually, when I put it that way, it seemed like it was worse. If I was going to get chucked out, I might as well avoid getting run through with spectral blades first.

I sighed. That really wasn’t an option. If I did my best and got kicked out, I could tell Amaranth that I’d tried. If I refused to fight knowing that would lead to my dismissal, that would be like quitting.. and Amaranth had ordered me to take this class.

The funny thing was, now that the pitchfork had been mocked I could suddenly “feel” it in my hands. The real thing was an infernal implement, a cursed weapon… and for that reason, my attempts to read its enchantments turned up nothing. To those who were sensitive to sanctity and its opposite, though, it apparently radiated very strongly.

The mockbox would copy exactly all the properties of whatever was placed into it, but its worldly magic could not duplicate the property of sanctity or infernality. Gloria’s sword, the original of which was almost certainly sanctified rather than enchanted, came out of the box with whatever enhancements had been laid into it but with no trace of holiness about it.

The pitchfork in my hands was much the same: an arcane copy of an infernal item. If I’d had an unlimited amount of time to study it, I could probably get a handle on most of its properties.

If I’d had unlimited time.

“Get a move on, Crybaby!” Dobbs shouted.

“Oh, stick a fork in it, Dobbs,” I said, giving the pitchfork a lazy twirl… “lazy” because I couldn’t have managed doing it quickly. I’d been going to say “stick a sock in it”, but came up with the variation at the last second. I smiled when he turned a little pale.

If only I could spook Gloria so easily. But, no… she was resolute. She looked a little scared, but it wasn’t the fear of a coward. She was going to do what she had to do, no matter how she felt.

I didn’t really want to spook her. She’d never been anything less than polite to me… almost friendly, even. Her religious background had made for some awkward moments, but she’d been helpful. Nice.

Now, as we squared off and prepared to fight, I could almost believe that she would have happily killed me for real. I was glad I had more than my knife with me, but I wished I’d had a chance to get some more practice with the pitchfork before it came down to this.

It was a bit late to think of this, but I wondered if Steff would have been willing to coach me in private, if we had known for certain that Gloria would be unavailable.

I held the pitchfork in much the same way I had when I’d tried to keep the demon dogs at bay with it. Gloria wasn’t a dumb animal, though, and she had a weapon to increase her reach. If she got past the points, she could probably bring the sword into play faster than I could pull the pitchfork back and bring it to bear again.

We stood facing each other, me with the pitchfork leveled and her with her sword raised. Neither one of us wanted to make the first move and expose ourselves to a counterattack.

The sun was bright in the clear blue sky, but it was a cold day. It seemed like it should have been raining, or at least overcast. What would Sooni have thought, if she’d seen this scene? She’d stop us and tell us it was all wrong.

I snorted at the idea, in spite of myself.

“You heard the coach, Crybaby!” Dobbs said. “Go for her throat.”

I ignored him. We were holding, the two of us. Gloria was no more or less going for my throat than I was going for hers. He was just a distraction, though. I could ignore him.

He wasn’t a problem.

“I said fight, you damned demon bitch!”

An ongoing distraction.

That might be a problem.

Figuring that a serious holier-than-thou case like Gloria would not be so dishonorable as to attack me when my back was turned, I wheeled around to face him.

“My name is Ms. Mackenzie,” I said. My voice came out slightly growly, but this was actually because I was straining to keep a lid on it.

“Fuck you, Coach says your name is Crybaby,” Dobbs said, as if he hadn’t called me anything more offensive than the coach’s “pet” name for me.

“Until you’re willing to come over here and knock me on my ass like ‘Coach’ did, you will address me as Ms. Mackenzie,” I said.

It was kind of a bluff, but it was a legitimate one. Callahan claimed the right to call me whatever the hell she wanted because I couldn’t stop her. Dobbs was too scared to get within arms’ reach of me. The fact that he was too much of a pussy to call my bluff meant it wasn’t a bluff.

He couldn’t beat me because he wouldn’t even try.

With that thought, I had a sudden, blinding flash of realization about Callahan’s methods, and her purpose in making Gloria and I fight like this.

No… no… wait.

That was actually just a sudden, blinding flash of pain as Gloria’s sword cleaved down through my skull and into my collarbone.

The sucker punch aside, the thing was completely unfair. I mean, I have to imagine that if this hadn’t been a mock combat, I would have died without feeling most of that.

“What… the… fuck?” I sputtered when my vision cleared and the illusory pain receded. I was on my side, looking up at Gloria.

“I will not sully the concept of honorable combat by engaging in it with you,” Gloria said. “Honor can be an arrogant man’s excuse for suffering evil to live.”

“So why haven’t you tried to kill me for real?” I asked.

“Because Khersis is a lawful deity,” she said. “‘To do right, you must not only ask what is good but also what is lawful, for reason must be tempered by morality and morality by reason.’”

I recognized the passage, though strangely, it hadn’t been one of my grandmother’s favorites. Dee had quoted it to Gloria, the time she’d attacked me with holy signs in the spiritual arts center.

“Be reasonable, then,” I said. “I haven’t done anything. I don’t want to do anything, but people keep pushing me…”

“Hey, class ain’t over,” Dobbs said. “Get up and do it again.”

“Get up,” Gloria said to me, ignoring Dobbs. “If you refuse, I will kill you again, on the count of three.”

“I’m getting up,” I said, groping for my pitchfork. My hand found it. As soon as my fingers closed around it, I knew what to do.

“Stand and make yourself…” she started to say, but I hit her in the shin with a wild swing of the pitchfork. It was an awkward angle, and the blow didn’t have a huge wind-up, but it had my strength behind it and the element of surprise on its side.

She went down, howling and grabbing her leg… obviously, losing her sword in the process of doing so.

Dobbs blew his whistle.

“You treacherous beast!” Gloria said, when she’d recovered from her shock.

I turned the pitchfork around and drove the tines through her chest. Her eyes went wide and blank and her mouth turned into a perfect “O”. I felt a sick thrill inside me at her scream. I pulled my weapon out, but not straight out… the awkwardness of the angle and my own lack of coordination made me pull down her body a bit in the process. There was resistance as if the embedded tines were tearing and stretching flesh, and then they were free.

Dobbs blew his whistle again.

“Foul!” he yelled. “That was bad form.”

“This isn’t a duel,” I said to Gloria, but loud enough to make sure Dobbs could hear. I took a step back and adjusted my grip on the pitchfork. I knew how to use it best now… both to best effect, and best against this foe. “Pick up your sword and fight me. If you refuse, I’ll kill you again on a count of three.”

She nodded, grimly, got to her feet and recovered her sword. We each stepped back. She held her sword in front of her and gave me a small nod, like the tiniest of bows. I returned it.

She ran at me, sword held at the ready. I took a half step back and twisted my body around. I was holding the pitchfork with both hands up near the pointed end.

I swung the thing like a club at Gloria’s head as she approached. She raised her sword with both hands, too late and too slow to do anything but catch the blow head-on with it. The sword clanged like a gong and flew out of her grasp, the flat side whacking her in the face and then falling to the ground.

I think the force of the blow not-broke her arms. Given my intimate familiarity with not-injuries, I might have been inclined to sympathize.

Might have…

Didn’t.

She stared at me in disbelief and horror.

I hit her again, the wooden pole cracking against her upraised arms with a sick and satisfying sound. I battered her until she couldn’t raise them any more. Each blow was accompanied by the simulated sound of bones cracking, though her body remained healthy and whole.

When she could no longer shield herself, I swung the shaft back and then let fly at the side of her head like I was wielding a broadsword. The impact knocked her spinning away sideways.

She landed on her side and rolled over onto her back. If it had been a real weapon, she’d have been dead twice… once from the pulped skull and once from the broken neck.

I was over her as she recovered. I think she’d actually blacked out briefly from the pain. As she came back to an awareness of herself, I thumped the end of the pitchfork down on her chest. She tried to rise and I did it again, harder.

“Stop!” she cried.

“Class isn’t over yet,” I said, giving her a prod with enough strength to crack her ribs.

As long as she was down on the ground, with no weapon in her hand, she wasn’t hurting me.

“Stop it!” she said. She started to raise her arms. I didn’t think she was just trying to block the blows, so I drove the pitchfork down as hard as I could before she could form any signs. She stiffened and her arms flailed out to the side.

I felt my stomach lurch when the end of the pitchfork drove through her stomach. The weapons weren’t incorporeal illusions. They wouldn’t seamlessly interpenetrate a body unless they penetrated it. That meant, mockery notwithstanding, I was driving a blunt weapon through her frail little meat shell with my strength alone.

I kept pushing, though, until I was sure it had come out the other side and been driven into the ground beneath her. She was well and truly pinned now, impaled on the semi-solid weapon.

Her body twitched and her eyes rolled up in her head, and then she was disturbingly still.

I wondered, could I just keep it there for the rest of the class? What would that do to her mind?

For that matter, what would it do to mine?

The anger and fear that had driven me to such savagery were draining away from me, and now I was looking at a woman… a very beautiful, occasionally kind young woman… with the image of a cursed weapon sticking through her stomach.

She wasn’t actually dead. I could see her perfect chest rising and falling, slowly.

That didn’t make the image any better.

A small movement caught my attention. Her hand twitched. That was all the warning I had before her eyes snapped back into focus, and she grabbed the pole with one hand.

It would have been a superhuman feat of endurance if she’d actually been wounded, but I supposed that all she was really doing was pushing past the pain.

It was still scary to see.

“Stay down,” I said. “I don’t want to do that again.”

“Going… to… have to,” she said. She tried to pull the pitchfork out of her, but she didn’t have the leverage.

“You weren’t like this before,” I said. “What the hell happened?”

“You… attacked… humans,” she said.

“I told you, that was self-defense.”

“Delvers… in the labyrinth.”

Shit. She was definitely getting more of her strength back.

“They attacked me,” I said.

She let go of the shaft, and I thought for a second that she’d given up… then, she wrenched herself to the side. There was a horrific wet ripping sound… much like a torso would have made if it were being sawed through with a blunt pole… and then she was on her stomach, shaking like a leaf beside the still-standing pitchfork.

“Oh, fuck,” I said. I dived for my weapon and wrenched it out of the ground as she picked herself up to her feet. I’d beat her down if I had to, but I was growing weary of the brutality it required.

“You have a talent,” she said, bending down by her sword and groping for it while keeping her eyes on me, “for provoking humans into attacking you. It is a convenient thing, for one who would claim self-defense.”

“It’s my fault, then, somehow, that delvers tried to kill me?” I asked.

“Fault does not enter into it,” she said. She’d found the hilt of her sword, and straightened up. She was breathing hard. One hand was on her stomach, as if she couldn’t believe there was no wound there. “There is no blame for your nature. You are simply… a threat to be dealt with.”

“I’m a threat because people keep attacking me?”

“People keep attacking you because you are a threat,” she said.

“I don’t do anything to them,” I said.

“You exist,” she said.

“I can’t do anything about that,” I said.

“You could stop.”

“Fuck that!” I yelled. “Am I just supposed to surrender to anybody who looks at me funny? Lay down and die? Is that the only way I can be good in your eyes?”

“You will never be good,” Gloria said, and her eyes lit up with anger at the mere idea of that. “But you will at least cease to be evil.”

“I’ve never meant to be evil,” I said. “And I’ve done my fucking best to be good. I’ve never killed anybody, but I’m not about to let anybody kill me.”

Gloria opened her mouth to retort, but her first word was drowned out by a whistle. It wasn’t the sound of the metal whistles that the coaches wore around their necks, but a sharper, shriller sound that pierced my skull like Gloria’s sword had earlier. We both froze, and then turned to see Coach Callahan standing there with two fingers between her lips.

“Congratulations, Emo Kid,” she said. “You’re in the class, after all. Take your friend to the healing center and then hit the library. I want you to find a book called The Warrior’s Handbook. Read the first five chapters before you come back here, Thursday… ready to be taught.”

“Gloria isn’t my friend,” I said. “And I don’t think she needs the healing center.”

“I wasn’t talking about her,” Callahan said. She jerked her head in the direction of a cluster of students… or rather, at Steff, who was laid out on the ground in the middle of them.

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He did take some time to question the possible applications of my mirror finish enhancement. I’d just wanted to make my knife look cool, since I had to lug it around anyway… but since I’d lost both the knife and that requirement, I wasn’t sure what to tell him.

“I just wanted to see if I could do it,” I said.

“That is an admirable sentiment, and you are a remarkably apt young woman,” he said. “If this interruption had come any later in the quarter, it might have set you back, but I think you’ll be fine with simply moving forward.”

He left me to finish up the spell on my practice knife. I was glad I’d sketched out an initial version of the enhancement the last time I’d been in class, a week before. That made it easier to pick back up where I’d left off. I was more careful this time not to just pour my energy into it like I had before. Though I no longer had to worry about “overdrawing”, I did have to watch that I didn’t exhaust my ordinary stores.

I didn’t spend much of the work period actually working magic. Instead, I’d spend a few seconds concentrating on the knife, then a few minutes adjusting the formulae I’d laid down and then trying out the new variation. It was pretty tedious going.

I couldn’t help but think how close this approach was to the old “scientific” method of formalizing spells that had been left behind in the dark ages, the way that resulted in spells that only worked at all under highly select circumstances and could rarely be duplicated by more than a handful of people. It was basically a lot of guesswork and predictions about the behavior of forces that could only truly be experienced directly… but the property I was working with was nebulous and could only be “held” so tightly or so long before the strain got to me.

The “basic principle of magic” was sometimes jokingly defined as “It behaves in unexpected ways except when you expect it to, when it either will or won’t.” Sitting around bullshitting about what might or might not work, or how something might react, could ultimately be no substitute for actually doing it. Several times during the course of the period, I found I had to change my tactics around completely as what I’d worked out no longer worked… but I was able to keep a flexible enough approach that it was a matter of ten steps forward, nine steps back.

Even with the variables shifting around on me, by the end of the class period I had outlined a technique that I could repeat with reasonable consistency. It wasn’t a formal spell, but I could refine it before Thursday and come in ready to do some proper work, and then have a spell ready to turn in by the end of the period.

After that it was back to Harlowe. I decided to change into some of my older surviving clothes while I was grabbing my pitchfork. There was no sense getting my nicer things messed up. Steff certainly wouldn’t be wearing her gorgeous elven style dress to a fighting class, after all.

My anger of a couple hours ago had long since faded, but I was feeling plenty frustrated from my attempts to grapple with a specific enchantment on the theoretical rather than the practical level. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the next hour and a half, but it would be nice if I had a chance to work through some of my stress.

Also, there would be Gloria.

“Oh, there you are!” I heard one of the Leightons say from their doorway as I headed out through mine. I turned to see them looking at me, with big fake looks of concern and sad puppy dog eyes. “We just wanted to let you know that we are so sorry about that article,” Tara said. “We feel terrible.”

“I just bet you do,” I said, turning away. The anger was returning, but it would be more productive to use it out on the field than to blow my top in the hallway, especially holding such a stereotypical weapon as the pitchfork. Who knew when Mr. Angstrom would come back for a follow-up piece?

“No, really!” Sara said. “We were misquoted!”

I found that hard to believe, but it piqued my curiosity.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yes,” Tara said. “He took our words completely out of context. See, we were talking about how bad you smell, and your toilet regime is only part of that. He left out the rest. Would you like to hear it?”

“No,” I said, turning and walking away as fast as I could without whacking my leg into the bottom of the pitchfork pole. I was carrying it upright, of course. The last thing I wanted to do was impale somebody on the way to class.

“I guess you’ll have to read it on the letters page, then!” one of them said, and they both shrieked with laughter.

Fucking hell, they were a couple of annoying cunts. Well, to be accurate, they were one cunt with a couple of annoying heads. Maybe that was their problem… too many girls and not enough holes to go around? I could fix that problem real quick. They’d probably like having separate gashes for a change.

Or maybe I could just separate them completely, right down the middle.

I stopped myself, mid-thought and mid-step, halfway down a flight of stairs. It wasn’t the best place to do so… my foot stopped but my body kept going, and I took another tumble down to the landing. That was enough to jar me completely from the state of mind I’d been in.

Holding the pitchfork and getting angry was apparently not a good thing. I would seriously need to find a different weapon or get myself into some kind of unarmed class… probably the former. I felt I’d made too much progress in my sessions with Gloria to simply throw it away.

Well, the school owed me a magic knife, didn’t they?

I tucked the shaft of the pitchfork under my arm, thinking it might “count less” if it wasn’t actually in my hand, and tried to think positively on the rest of the way to the field.

The fork hadn’t had nearly as noticeable an effect on me when I’d first picked it up, but a lot of curses worked incrementally like that. If you knew something was bad news when you first laid hands on it, you’d never come to depend on it.

Two surprises were waiting for me when I got to class.

One was Steff, looking absolutely stunning and completely out of place in her princess dress.

The other was Gloria, who was nowhere to be seen.

I headed towards Steff, but Callahan had just arrived on the scene and blew her whistle.

“What in the name of the Dark Herald are you wearing, Johnson?” she asked Steff while the class was coming to attention.

“It’s called a ‘dress’, sir,” Steff replied loudly. “If it looks sort of familiar, that’s probably because I took it off of your mother last night.”

“Johnson, come here,” Callahan said, and Steff swaggered over with a shit-eating grin. I could have told her that she was about to be punched in the face… but I would have been wrong. As soon as Steff was within arm’s reach, the instructor reached out and grabbed her by the crotch and squeezed.

“Go change,” she said loudly as Steff’s knees buckled and her eyes bulged “Back in ten minutes or you’re marked absent, and if you ever show up for my class not dressed for combat, I’m keeping these. Understand?”

Steff nodded, gasping and sputtering, and Callahan let her go and turned away dismissively to talk to her teaching assistant. I shifted my pitchfork to my hand as she sank to the ground, and I was by her side in an instant.

“Are you okay?” I asked. As ever, a stupid question to ask. I knew the answer. I’d seen what happened and rushed to her aid, after all.

Steff nodded, though.

“I’m… fine,” she said, breathing hard and ragged. “Oh, sweet fucking hell, I hope she does that again before… before she fucks me.”

“What?” I asked. I knew Steff enjoyed receiving pain as well as giving it, but it didn’t seem possible for somebody with her anatomy to enjoy that.

“Sent her a strap-on through campus mail last week, along with… along with a calendar, with the last day of classes circled,” Steff said, starting to get to her feet. I helped her up. “Black leather. She didn’t say anything, so I think… she must be into it. That… what you just saw… was just foreplay.”

“Or she hates you,” I said.

“Of course she does,” Steff said. “That’s what makes it hot. Anyway, I’ve got to go change.”

“Can you really make it to the dorms and back in under ten minutes, like that?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” Steff said. “According to her, she’s already counted me absent every day so far. It’s just… just flirting, Mack.”

I thought she was kidding herself, but didn’t want to argue. “Do you want some help getting back?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“You need to stay here and practice,” she said. “And pick somebody else.”

“I guess I might have to,” I said.

She kissed me, leaning on me for support as she did.

“Swap spit on your own time, Johnson! Shift!” Callahan barked.

“Yes, sir, ma’am, sir!” Steff said, saluting, and then she hobbled away.

“Crybaby,” Callahan said. “I wanted to see you next, anyway. Well, not ‘wanted’, exactly. I’ve yet to come up with any scenario in which the sight of you would actually be desirable.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked, stomping right up to her.

Just let her try to punch me, I thought. I’ll burn her hand off.

“Khee, I don’t know, maybe I’m having a bad period?” she said. “Do you want to see my note?”

“You just assaulted a student,” I said, biting back the urge to call her a crazy bitch… by biting my lip. I tasted a faint trace of blood in my mouth.

“That’s what they pay me the big bucks for.”

“They pay you to teach us to fight!” I yelled right up in her face, my voice rising out of control.

“Riiight,” she said, calmly wiping blood mixed with spittle off her face. “Which brings me to the question of why you’re here. Honestly, Crybaby, I’m having a hard time seeing why I shouldn’t boot your ass out.”

Was she for real? Hadn’t she got the fucking memo?

“I had an excuse for last week!” I said.

“How about the week before?” she asked.

“Um, I was here the week before,” I said.

“Yeah, and so what’s your excuse?” she asked.

“For what?”

“Spending all your time making goo-goo eyes at your island girlfriend instead of sparring,” she said.

“We were sparring,” I said.

“You were dancing,” she said. She turned and looked around the crowd. “Dhambizao!”

A knot of students parted as Gloria, looking very grave, came forward. Any delusions I might have harbored that we’d be able to get past our misunderstanding were shattered with one look at her face.

“Yes, ma’am?” she said, her voice completely neutral. Her eyes were fixed straight on Coach Callahan, not even glancing at me.

“You and Crybaby here are going to fight each other one more time,” Callahan said. “Or should I say, one first time?”

“Respectfully, ma’am, I have no wish to…”

“Do I look like a fucking djinni, Dhambizao?” Callahan said. “Do you see a veil on my head or smoke coming out of my fucking ass?”

Gloria shook her head.

“No, ma’am,” she said.

“Then save your wishes for somebody who cares,” the coach said. “You aren’t going to coddle her. You’re not going to let her dance around and dodge your attacks. You’re going to go for her fucking throat, every time. And you,” she said, turning to me, “are going to do the same. Don’t just bore holes through her tits with your eyes.” I couldn’t miss the sharp intake of air from Gloria at these words. “Take that fork and ram it through them. Now, you two go get your weapons mocked and get to it. Dobbs will watch to make sure you’re really fighting while I drill the rest of the class.”

“How long do we have to fight?” I asked.

“How much time is left in the period?” she answered. “Go get your weapons mocked and get it on, ladies. Everybody else, form a circle. Those of you who have any progress will have it evaluated today.”

Silently, Gloria and I headed over to the tables where the mockboxes were kept. She laid her ornate sword in a long one on the table and closed the lid while I went to the largest one, which actually stood upright like a wardrobe, and placed my pitchfork inside.

“I see you have finally relinquished one charade,” Gloria said as she opened the lid. She was inspecting the spectral duplicate, not looking at me. “Does this mean you are done with the pretense of wounded innocence?”

“What charade?” I asked.

“You have laid aside the puny knife with which you mocked me, and brought forth your own weapon,” she said, holding the sword up to the sunlight.

“The knife was my weapon,” I said. “I lost it. Well, I didn’t lose it, but…”

“I have heard enough lies,” she said, turning to face me for the first time. Her eyes blazed so fiercely, they might have been on fire. “I have been deceived by my charitable nature for the last time. Bring your best violence to bear, Mackenzie Blaise… today, we fight.”

“Good morning, Mack,” she said when she became aware I was stirring.

She’d been getting ready in the dark, her eyes glowing faintly from her dark vision enchantment.

“Good morning, Two,” I said, not bothering to stifle my yawn.

“I’m going to go meditate with my friend Dee,” Two said. “Would you like to join us?”

“I don’t even have to be in class until three today,” I said.

“Oh,” Two said. “Would you like to join us?”

I sighed. I was awake, and I’d have plenty of time to come back to the room and go to sleep, afterwards.

“Okay,” I said. “If you don’t think Dee will mind.”

“I don’t think she will,” Two said.

I’d started the school year with four classes scheduled for Monday, but I’d switched two of them. My new history class wasn’t until 4:30, after my logic class, and my weapon proficiency class met on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Ordinarily I still would have had to go to my thaumatology lecture in the morning, but Professor Goldman had effectively excused most of the class by giving us bonus credit and then scheduling a hairy test. This was supposed to be a lesson in tolerance… the students who hadn’t earned the bonus credit had been snubbing me. I had a suspicion they’d be more inclined to take the professor’s actions as justification for their attitude rather than seeing it as a chance to reflect upon it.

I was kind of curious about the test, but not curious enough to show up in a room that would contain only people who hated my guts and had one more thing to blame me for than the rest of the campus.

Two took her skimpy negligee off before going to her dresser and picking out her clothing for the day. She was utterly without self-consciousness about being nude in front of me. I couldn’t imagine she’d act that way in front of anybody else, but once I’d labeled her my sister, it had changed all the rules in her head.

I wasn’t looking… I swear, I wasn’t… but I wasn’t not looking, either, and I couldn’t help noticing that she was, um, smooth. All over. Had she been created that way, or had she been instructed to groom herself like that?

The implications were disquieting either way. The question “why would somebody make a magical assistant that looks like a waifish teenage girl?” pretty much had only one answer. Add full elven waxing to the equation and the conclusion was almost inescapable.

Dee was already waiting in the hall when we finished dressing, and she simply nodded when Two asked her if I could join them.

“The meditation chambers are beneath the spiritual arts center,” Dee said to me, on the way. “The building itself is not sanctified, but you may experience some discomfort from residual energy.”

“Well, I can give it a try,” I said.

“If you are willing,” Dee said, nodding. “Meditation can be carried out anywhere, but I find it soothing to do it underground.”

I felt a prickling on my skin when we entered the building, which had seen divine magic channeled from every god worshipped by divine casters at MU. The sensation wasn’t terribly uncomfortable, but it was a bit distracting.

“I would not recommend exploring on your own,” Dee said to me. “You may inadvertently stray into a protected area.”

The spiritual arts building wasn’t a temple, but it had been built with a different aesthetic sense than most of the classroom facilities. The ceilings were higher and vaulted, and the doors which led off from the hallway had high arched tops. There were pictures on the wall of higher concepts in abstract, and paintings of gods and goddesses in their various aspects, and statues of the Great Star Drake who had made the world.

Khersis, naturally, was represented rather prominently. The images of Khersis Dei didn’t bother me, but all the paintings of Lord Khersis seemed to be following me with their eyes. It was like they were saying, “I know what you are. You cannot fool me.”

The fact that so many of them depicted him in the act of slaying a demon didn’t help things, either.

I shivered. Even before I’d learned my true heritage, I’d always found images of Lord Khersis intimidating. He was supposed to be handsome to the point of being beautiful, but his beauty was sorely out of place on his broad, tall, muscular frame. He looked like an elf and an ogre had mated, and somehow produced a sort of man.

That thought was, of course, wickedly blasphemous, and I turned my gaze to the floor so I wouldn’t have to see any more of the paintings.

“You are uncomfortable,” Dee said.

“I’ll live,” I said.

“The lower level is much more functionally appointed,” Dee said. “Come.”

“Mackenzie!” a voice called from behind us. “Mackenzie Blaise.”

It was Gloria, my sparring partner. She was a child of Khersian ministries, from somewhere in the Archipelago. With her almost lyrical accent, she pronounced each syllable of my name with distinct emphasis, and softened the “a” sound to an “ah.” It gave me a shiver to hear it, even as I registered a certain iciness.

“Um, excuse me, guys,” I said to Two and Dee.

“Okay,” Two said. Dee nodded.

What did Gloria want, I wondered? And why hadn’t I showered, and done something with my hair? What could I do with my hair?

I walked back towards Gloria as nonchalantly as I could, my heart pounding in my chest. So far, I’d never talked to her outside of mixed melee, where of course we did more mock fighting than talking.

“Uh, hi, Gloria,” I said. “What… um… what are you doing here?”

Stupid question. This was the spiritual arts center. She was a divine magic major. She had far more business being there than I did.

“Is it true?” she asked.

“Is what true?” I asked, feeling guilty when I considered the sheer amount of different things she could be referring to. She could be talking about the skirmish match, or any number of other recent events.

“That you tried to kill a human skirmish player who lives in your dorm,” she said.

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “I didn’t try to kill anybody.”

“She showed up for the match on Saturday with injuries,” Gloria said. “I helped to heal them.”

“She attacked me, Gloria,” I said.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“Well, I… I bit her,” I said. “But, you were able to heal her, right?”

Her eyes narrowed and she stared at me.

“Then… it was self-defense,” she said.

I nodded. I wasn’t sure I would call it that… I’d been mad with hunger when Rocky had attacked me… but I was grateful for her understanding, anyway.

“Yeah, sort of,” I said. “I shouldn’t have bit her… I could have hurt her a lot worse than I did… but…”

“Monster,” she said, and raised her hands in the oh-so-familiar warding gesture. There was an explosion of white light and I flew backwards. My back hit something hard, and something both hard and pointy hit my head and then landed in my lap.

When sight and sound returned to me, Two’s butt was shaking in my face for some reason. I had one of the Drake statues between my legs. Dee was arguing with Gloria.

Elves have magic in their voices, when they want to. Dee normally spoke softly but confidently, letting the weight of her words alone do the job. Now, she had raised her voice and put all the power she had into it… for all the good it did.

“You misunderstood,” she said.

“She fed on a human… unprovoked,” Gloria said. “She does not even deny it.”

“She was attacked,” Dee said.

“In self-defense,” Gloria said. “She admitted as much.”

“You misunderstood,” Dee repeated. “She was attacked, and she responded in self-defense.”

My head was still swimming, but I was starting to understand it all. Well, everything except for why Two was crouched down in front of me. Gloria had assumed I instigated the fight with Rocky by biting her. When she flashed the Arms, the sheer force of it had knocked me back into the column-like pedestal beneath a Great Star Drake statue, which had then come crashing down on me.

“You did not see Raquel when she came into the healing tent,” Gloria said. “Her arm had a bite taken out of it. She was missing a finger.”

“I imagine the injuries the human fighter sustained reflected the extent of her poor judgment,” Dee said.

“Of course you would defend her,” Gloria said.

“Of course I would, and shall continue to do so,” Dee said. “She has named me friend, and while she has not always been the most sensitive of souls, she has her finer points. From what I have observed, loyalty is chief among them.”

“What does her kind know about loyalty?” Gloria asked. “What does yours?”

I pushed the statue aside.

“Two, could you please move?” I asked.

“No,” Two said, without turning around. “I’m defending you.”

“Two, I’m fine,” I said, crawling to the side to get around her and get to my feet. Two had her little mace out, and was clutching the handle in both hands like it was a broadsword. Did she have any real idea how to use it?

“Do you really mean to slay a student, in open defiance of the law?” Dee asked Gloria.

“There are higher laws,” Gloria said.

“Did not Lord Khersis say, ‘To do right, you must not only ask what is good but also what is lawful, for reason must be tempered by morality and morality by reason.’?” Dee asked.

Gloria glowered at Dee.

“You have acted in haste,” Dee said. “There is no shame in making a mistake, but there is in not recognizing it. Your friend was not the aggrieved party.”

Gloria tensed, balling her fists, but then relaxed. I realized she wasn’t even wearing her blessed sword. That was probably a good thing.

“She is not my friend,” she said. “I do not care for her attitude. But, she is a fellow human, and under the protection of Khersis and those who serve him.”

“I feel that you owe somebody an apology,” Dee said.

Gloria turned to me.

“I do not understand you, Mackenzie,” she said, “and this disturbs me.”

“That may have been the most honest expression of human sentiment I have ever heard,” Dee said. “But it was not an apology.”

Gloria turned and started to walk away. Her beaded braids swished and clacked against each other, her hips swayed with cat-like allure.

“Hey!” Two called after her. “You’re supposed to apologize.”

“It’s okay,” I said, putting my hand on Two’s shoulder to restrain her as she started to follow Gloria. “At least I got my daily ambush out of the way early.”

I gingerly felt the top of my head where the statue had come crashing down on it. There was no injury there, of course, but the area responded to my touch as if it was extremely tender. That raised the question of why I was touching it, but the habit or compulsion or whatever was that strongly ingrained.

If I hadn’t been invulnerable or the statue had been blessed, I probably would have been knocked unconscious or worse. As it was, I only had to put up with the pain of a potentially killing blow.

Yay.

“Do you wish to continue with our chosen course?” Dee asked.

“Might as well,” I said. “Two, you didn’t have to defend me, by the way.”

“I know,” Two said. “I wanted to.”

She gave a shaky smile. Most of Two’s wants–the ones she felt confident enough to express as wants, anyway–seemed to revolve around me in some way. It was both comforting, and discomfiting. She’d already injured herself trying to summon a demon for reasons I still didn’t understand. I didn’t want her doing anything like interposing herself between me and an angry mob.

“Two, that’s sweet, I can take care of myself,” I said.

She blinked.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think you can.”

“Well, I can do a better job of defending me than you would with your little mace,” I said.

She shook her head.

“I think you are mistaken,” she said.

I sighed.

“Don’t put yourself in physical danger on my account,” I said.

“Okay,” she said.

Dee led us to the end of the hall, down the stairs, and into a sparse meditation chamber, furnished only with mats on the floor. After checking that we were all comfortable in the dark, she showed me the appropriate position in which to sit. Two had already assumed it.

I didn’t really have much more than a pop culture idea of what meditation entailed. It turned out that it wasn’t completely off, but wasn’t entirely accurate, either. The ideas I’d got from TV were to actual meditation what kids waving toy swords around were to fighting: aping the outward flourishes without understanding what’s going on underneath.

Dee instructed me in breathing and then guided me through a series of muscle relaxing exercises, her voice no more than a whisper in my ear. Once I was completely relaxed, she told me to let my mind wander, and then gradually clear it by focusing briefly on whatever images appeared and then “pushing” them out.

Even without a throbbing pain in my head, I’d never been very good at emptying my mind, or focusing on any one thing without actually doing something, but I found that I liked it, sitting there in the dark basement chamber with my mind turning to nothing in particular. I was as physically at ease as I’d ever been, and in the company of nobody who wished me ill.

Somehow, with Dee’s guidance and in spite of myself, I drifted into a state of emptiness that was as peaceful as it was profound. I forgot about my pain. I forgot about everything.

After an hour or so, Dee helped me come gradually out of it, and the three of us headed back upstairs and outside without saying a word.

“Thank you for joining me today,” Dee said, bowing to me. I returned the gesture, a little awkwardly. I hoped Dee appreciated it… my back twinged in pain from where I’d hit the pedestal. “Perhaps we shall do it again sometime, in a different venue.”

“I’d like that,” I said, though I’d enjoyed the atmosphere of the subterranean chamber.

Two and I headed back to Harlowe while Dee headed off across campus. Two had classes to get ready for, but I simply crawled back into bed. Dull throbbing in my head and ache in my back aside, I felt totally refreshed, and yet was still relaxed enough to fall asleep as soon as my cheek touched the pillow.

The lights were out in all the chambers, so Gloria simply picked the first one on her left. She stepped in the door and flipped on the light, jumping and screaming in fright at the dark figure sitting cross-legged in the center of the floor.

The first thing that Gloria registered was that the woman was nude, and her skin was black… not black in the human sense, as Gloria’s was, but black. If there was any variation in her body’s pigmentation, either in her lips or her nipples or anywhere else, it was too subtle for Gloria to pick out. In fact, if not for her eyebrows and the white hair which spilled down around her shoulders, the thin form might have been carved from a single block of onyx.

When Gloria took in the thin, angular and androgynous beauty of the woman’s face and her pointed ears, she realized she was looking at a dark elf and her hand went to the hilt of her sword.

A moment later she realized that the elf had not yet made a move, hostile or other, and she relaxed, feeling embarrassed. She realized she’d been staring at the statue-like figure for far too long before she found her voice.

“I’m sorry,” she said, backing out through the door “I expected this room to be empty. The, ah, light was off.”

“I prefer the dark,” the seated woman said without opening her eyes, and barely even moving her lips.

“I can imagine,” Gloria said. “I apologize. I’m interrupting; I will go.”

“Please, the interruption has already occurred,” the dark elf replied. Her eyes were still closed. “I try to choose my hours of meditation to coincide with times when the building will most likely be empty. I find myself curious as to why another should visit the chambers at this hour.”

“Midnight services just ended,” Gloria said, not moving from the doorway. “And, after… I needed time to think. The temple and the dormitory are both social places, in their own way, and I preferred to be alone with my thoughts.”

“What is your name?”

“I am called Gloria,” Gloria said. “Gloria Dhambizao.”

“I am Delia Daella d’Wyr,” the meditating elf said. “Called Delia Daella, or Dee to those who would be my friends.”

“May I call you Dee?” Gloria asked.

“That is your determination to make.”

“Then I will,” Gloria said. “May I ask you a question, Dee?”

“You may,” Dee said.

“You are naked,” Gloria said.

“Your powers of perception are remarkable for a human,” Dee said. “However, that is not a question.”

“Is this some sort of… rite?” Gloria asked. She swallowed. “What I mean to say is… I am not sure how to phrase this.”

“Am I engaged in a sexual ritual? In a manner of speaking,” Dee said. “I am an initiated priestess of the forsaken goddess, and the thoughts I have come here to think are not a priestess’s thoughts. I would not wear a priestess’s robes while I entertain them.”

“Do you have no other garments?”

“Any garment I own is a priestess’s, is it not?” Dee said.

“I see,” Gloria said. “I suppose I can understand. That is the other reason I did not remain in the temple.”

“You are troubled by impious thoughts?”

“By worldly matters.”

“Will you sit?” Dee asked. She still had yet to open her eyes or move.

“Will you dress?” Gloria asked.

“Not until I have purified my thoughts,” Dee said.

“I am not comfortable speaking with a naked woman,” Gloria said. “I’m sorry.”

“Is it a matter of your faith?”

“It is a matter of decency.”

“There is nothing indecent about my body,” Dee said without rancor. “There are sacraments which require me to bare it.”

“I am not surprised,” Gloria said. “Being that you are dedicated to an evil goddess, such perversion is to be expected.”

“Arakhis is not evil,” Dee said. “She is a goddess of intricacy.”

“I suppose she must not seem evil, to you,” Gloria said charitably. “I believe that the commission of evil acts is a matter of ignorance among humans, and possibly among other races of similar intelligence.”

“I find myself strangely in agreement,” Dee said, a wry note in her voice which Gloria did not understand. “In any event, you do not fear to converse with an ‘evil’ priestess but you balk at nudity?”

“I fear no evil thing beneath the sun,” Gloria said.

“I am afraid I qualify on neither count,” Dee said. “But you need not fear me.”

Gloria came into the room, closing the door behind her. She took up a position about five feet away from Dee, mimicking her cross-legged posture. Once she was settled, Dee slowly opened her eyes and took in Gloria’s appearance.

“You are of the Argenti, I think?” she asked.

“Yes,” Gloria said. “You know of my people?”

“I have greater academic knowledge of your culture than that which plays host to us,” Dee said. “My formal schooling focused more on the human race in its natural state than the light skinned variants which have come after. I did not know that animists had temples.”

“I am a Khersian,” Gloria said. “It is the natural religion of humanity, whatever choices individuals or groups may make to the contrary.”

“I apologize,” Dee said, bending at the waist to bow forward on the floor. “I meant no affront.”

“Do not bow to me, please,” Gloria said, grimacing and twisting away.

“It is my way of apologizing,” Dee said, lifting herself back into the upright seated position. “I should know better than to draw inferences from the color of your skin. I am distracted by my troubles.”

“What troubles you?”

“Thoughts of people I love dearly,” Dee said, “and will not see again until my schooling here is complete.”

“Will you not go home for the summer?” Gloria asked.

“The journey from my home to the surface or back takes weeks to complete and is too dangerous to be undertaken without necessity,” Dee said. “I will not see my family and my loved ones for four years.”

“I sympathize,” Gloria said. “My situation is much the same. But is four years so long, for your kind?”

“There are the same number of seconds in a year for an elf as there are for a human,” Dee said. “Though, of course, we do not actually mark time in the same way. Your days and years are based on the movements of the sun. We have no such markers to rely upon.”

“How do you measure time, then?” Gloria asked.

“Our time is divided into… shifts… of about twelve hours,” Dee said. “One shift for eating, resting, and reflection followed by one dedicated to labor and duty. Five hundred and thirty-two shifts make up a cycle, the closest thing we reckon to a year.”

“It seems strange,” Gloria said. “I realize you do not see the sun, but would it not be useful to track days and years anyway?”

“Useful in what sense?”

Gloria had no answer for that. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

“What is the basis for your cycle?” she asked instead. “Some event?”

“Motherhood,” Dee replied. “It is the basis for everything. A child leaves the womb one cycle old, so it is the most convenient measure of age.”

“Then you believe life begins at conception,” Gloria reasoned.

Dee nodded.

“We celebrate each new life,” she said. “It is considered a sin to bring about a birth which cannot be joyously welcomed.”

“Do dark elves practice abortion, then?”

“I do not like that term,” Dee said. “Are you a dark human?”

“I am a native of the Argentus Archipelago,” Gloria said. “The people of this land call me islander, Pelagian, and other names… but in the language of my people, our name simply means ‘people.’ I call myself human.”

“And by that token, I am an elf,” Dee said. “To answer your question, we do our best to avoid it, but sometimes it is necessary to send a child on into the silence. Ideally, this is done before she has been born, but the world is not always ideal.”

“Indeed it is not, but I can hardly imagine a situation where such a thing would be ‘necessary’,” Gloria said. “The murder of a child is among the highest of crimes.”

“The Argentus Archipelago is in the region of the outer world denoted as the tropics, is it not?” Dee asked. Gloria nodded. “Where the sun shines warm and bright for an entire year, and the trees grow heavy with fruit and shelter abundant animal life?”

“Yes,” Gloria said. “The islands are sometimes referred to as a worldly paradise, though they are not without their hardships and dangers.”

“But those hardships do not include a paucity of food,” Dee said. “My people live in caverns of lifeless stone. In this day and age, we have settled and carved out great cities around the underground lakes and seas, and we cultivate mushrooms, fungus… lizards for eggs and meat, but once we were nomads, roaming the endless tunnels in search of food and water. A child who could not be fed would be sent with love to the care of the goddess. It still happens, though not often. Births are planned carefully and awaited with great anticipation.”

“Children are a precious gift,” Gloria said. “A mother should go hungry rather than let her child go wanting.”

“And if the mothers all starve and there’s none left to care for the children?” Dee countered. “A capable elf who lives to adulthood can live forever and can always have more children. The survival of the family… of the race… rests with the mothers.”

“Well, I suppose it would be wrong of me to expect you to know any better than that,” Gloria said.

“Your generosity of spirit quite overwhelms me,” Dee said.

“I think I will pray for you, Dee,” Gloria said. “And your people.”

“I will pray for you, as well,” Dee said.

“What exactly would you be praying for?” Gloria asked, a nervous note in her voice.

“That you may have alim,” Dee said.

“What does that mean?” Gloria asked.

“Peace, safety, bounty, wisdom,” Dee said.

“All of that?”

“They are the same thing,” Dee said. “It was only when my people founded their cities and learned to husband their resources that they knew either peace or safety, and were able to pursue wisdom.”

“In a world like you describe, does not possessing bountiful resources make you a target for others?” Gloria asked.

“Yes,” Dee said. “It does.”

“So, as your bounty increases, is not your peace and safety imperiled?”

“Indeed.”

“So… what do you do?” Gloria asked.

“We pray often,” Dee said. “And we learn to defend ourselves.”

“I think I should go now,” Gloria said.

“I fear I have made you uncomfortable,” Dee said.

“It is like my interruption,” Gloria said. “The discomfort has already happened, but… perhaps it has been good for me.”

“Perhaps.”

“Goodbye, Dee.”

“Goodbye, Gloria Dhambizao,” Dee said. She closed her eyes again, and listened as Gloria rose and walked to the door. She felt the light go out and then the door closed, and she was alone once again with her thoughts.