The Grandmaster's Tale

A girl was lying face-down on the cupboard floor, her hands tied behind her back and her robe hiked up to reveal her underwear. Someone had wrapped a cloth around her ankles, making it hard for her to move and impossible to get to her feet. She turned her head, revealing that whoever had attacked her had stuffed something in her mouth to keep her from crying out. I swallowed, hard, as our eyes met. Geraldine was a prefect, one of the few students I trusted to actually do the job properly. It wasn't the safest position in the school—interfering prefects tended to be turned into things if they threw their weight around too much—but I’d thought she’d been doing well. Now … cold horror rushed through me as I pulled her hands free, allowing her to cover herself and pull the cloth out of her mouth. If she’d been sexually assaulted, all hell was going to break loose.

“I …” Geraldine swallowed hard and started again. “Sir, they took my magic!”

I blinked, then cast a diagnostic spell. The magic surrounding her lit up. I swore. Someone had hit her with a very nasty curse that dissolved her spells as she tried to cast them, rendering her effectively powerless and ensuring she couldn’t free herself in a hurry. The curse never lasted long, and could be countered by a trained magician who knew how to work their way around the edges of the spell, but to a student it was devastating. Geraldine was strong, and advanced for her age, yet she lacked the experience to know what had happened. She could have died a thousand deaths—perhaps literally—by the time the spell wore off.

“They didn’t.” I cast the counterspell, then looked away as she freed her legs and stumbled to her feet. She didn’t to think I was staring at her after she’d been stripped of all dignity. Boscha would probably fire her when he found out what had happened. How could she command respect after she’d been overpowered, tied up, exposed, and locked in a cupboard? “What happened? And who?”

Geraldine hesitated. I knew what she was thinking. If the school found out she’d tattled, she’d be an outcast for the rest of her schooling and probably for the rest of her life. I knew students who’d been flogged to within an inch of their lives and yet refused to breathe a word. Poor Geraldine would be better off accepting her defeat and looking for revenge on her own, rather than tattling. The gods knew her tormentors would probably get away with it. Geraldine was a newborn, and newborns rarely had the connections to make people pay.

“Tell me,” I said, sharply. I could make her talk—it would be easy—but no one would believe it. Damn the Code of the Schoolhouse! Damn it! “What happened …?”

Someone screamed down the corridor. Geraldine jerked her head downwards. I stood, gritting my teeth, and turned and hurried away, following the sound. I guessed something had happened, something that Geraldine had tried to stop … I heard someone laughing and cursed under my breath. I knew that laugh, the hated hunting call of an entitled brat who thought he could do what he liked, and no one would ever call him on it. A surge of hatred ran through me as I picked up speed, memories of my cousins laughing at me—and my brothers—in just the same way. We’d taught them respect, at least. They’d no longer laughed at us, not to our faces. But other students hadn’t learnt the same lesson …

I rounded the corner and stared. A young man stood in the centre of the chamber, his body jerking back and forth as he tried to throw off the compulsion charms. Four other students surrounded him, wands pointed at their victim as they chanted heavy-handed spells. I felt the magic crawling through the air, powered by the visceral contempt they felt for their target, and poisoning the world. The audience—students young and old—laughed and jeered. Some thought it was funny—it was always funny, until it happened to them. Others … I saw the fear in their eyes, the unspoken conviction that if they didn’t laugh they’d be the next to be forced to strip in front of a gawking rabble … I hated them for it. There were nearly twenty onlookers, including a bunch of older students. They could have crushed the bullies like bugs—they could have turned the bullies into bugs—if they’d acted as one. They didn’t.

Fear is the mind-killer, I thought, bitterly. My brothers and I had had each other, at least. We had always known we could rely on ourselves. They’re too scared to think straight.