Blood Song

The Aspect’s face clouded. “Your mother…” He stopped, his expression switching back to the same emotionless mask. “Your mother should not be mentioned again. Nor your father, or any other member of your family. You have no family now save the Order. You belong to the Order. You understand?”

The boy with the cut on his head had fallen again and was being beaten by the master, the cane rising and falling in regular even strokes, the master’s skull-like face betraying scant emotion. Vaelin had seen the same expression on his father’s face when he took the strap to one of his hounds.

You belong to the Order. To his surprise his heart had slowed, and he felt no quaver in his voice when he answered the Aspect, “I understand.”

The master’s name was Sollis. He had lean, weathered features and the eyes of a goat: grey, cold and staring. He took one look at Vaelin and asked, “Do you know what carrion is?”

“No sir.”

Master Sollis stepped closer, looming over him. Vaelin’s heart still refused to beat any faster. The image of the skull-faced master swinging his cane at the boy on the floor of the keep had replaced his fear with a simmering anger.

“It’s dead meat boy,” Master Sollis told him. “It’s the flesh left on the battlefield to be eaten by crows and gnawed by rats. That’s what awaits you, boy. Dead flesh.”

Vaelin said nothing. Sollis’s goat eyes tried to bore into him but he knew they saw no fear. The master made him angry, not afraid.

There were ten other boys allocated to the same room, an attic in the North Tower. They were all his age or close to it, some sniffling in loneliness and abandonment, others smiling continually with the novelty of parental separation. Sollis made them line up, lashing his cane at a beefy boy who was too slow. “Move smartly, dung head.”

He eyed them individually, stepping closer to insult a few. “Name?” he asked a tall, blond haired boy.

“Nortah Al Sendahl, sir.”

“It’s master not sir, shit-wit.” He moved down the line. “Name?”

“Barkus Jeshua, master,” the beefy boy he had caned replied.

“I see they still breed carthorses in Nilsael.”

And so on until he had insulted them all. Finally he stepped back to make a short speech: “No doubt your families sent you here for their own reasons,” Sollis told them. “They wanted you to be heroes, they wanted you to honour their name, they wanted to boast about you between swilling ale or whoring about town, or maybe they just wanted to be rid of a squalling brat. Well, forget them. If they wanted you, you wouldn’t be here. You’re ours now, you belong to the Order. You will learn to fight, you will kill the enemies of the Realm and the Faith until the day you die. Nothing else matters. Nothing else concerns you. You have no family, you have no dreams, you have no ambitions beyond the Order.”

He made them take the rough cotton sacks from their beds and run down the tower’s numerous steps and across the courtyard to the stable where they filled them with straw amidst a flurry of cane strokes. Vaelin was sure the cane fell on his back more than the others and suspected Sollis of forcing him towards the older, damper patches of straw. When the sacks were full he whipped them back up to the tower where they placed them on the wooden frames which would serve as their beds. Then it was another run down to the vaults beneath the keep. He made them line up, breath steaming in the chill air, gasps echoing loudly. The vaults seemed vast, brick archways disappearing into the darkness on every side. Vaelin’s fear began to rekindle as he stared into the shadows, bottomless and pregnant with menace.

“Eyes forward!” Sollis’s cane left a welt on his arm and he choked down a pain filled sob.

“New crop, Master Sollis?” a cheerful voice enquired. A very large man had appeared from the darkness, oil lamp flickering in his ham sized fist. He was the first man Vaelin had seen who seemed broader than he was long. His girth was confined within a voluminous cloak, dark blue like the other masters, but with a single red rose embroidered on the breast. Master Sollis’s cloak was bare of any decoration.

“Another sweeping of shit, Master Grealin,” he told the large man with an air of resignation.

Grealin’s fleshy face formed a brief smile. “How fortunate they are to have your guidance.”

There was a moment’s silence and Vaelin sensed the tension between the two men, finding it noteworthy that Sollis spoke first. “They need gear.”