Call of the Colossus: An epic fantasy novel (The Mindstream Chronicles Book 2) (14 page)

He looked down at his clothing. “Yah, just a misunderstanding.” He showed her the clean uniform. “See?”

She visibly relaxed but still looked at him warily as she pointed to the opposite corner. “There’s clean water in the last one. Soap’s in the basket. Leave the damp towel on the floor.” She tossed him a clean towel and pointed to the bell cord in the corner. “Ring if you need anything.”

The heavy clang of a bell emanated from somewhere above. The first dinner bell. His stomach growled in response. “How long do I have before the third bell?”

“An hour,” she said and left.

The bathing room was roughly thirty feet square with three rows of four metal tubs each. Against one wall was a stove, but no water sat boiling on top. He went to the tub she’d indicated. It had about four inches of water in the bottom, clear when he got in and gray when he got out. Feeling more refreshed than he had in nearly two weeks, he dried himself and dressed, then padded back to his room, where he found his old boots by the bed and a pair of shiny black ones beside it. They weren’t new boots, he discovered when he slid his feet into them. The cynic in him wondered if the previous owner was one of the enforcers Jora killed in Three Waters. It didn’t matter. They fit well enough and would mold to his own feet in time.

The uniform shirt, on the other hand, was tight in the arms, and the trousers were loose in the waist. He didn’t know whether it was worth complaining about. His reflection in the mirror made him look fit and strong, the way an officer of the law was supposed to look.

The door opened without warning, and Trond stuck his head in. “Good. You’re dressed. Come with me. You need to take your oath.”

Korlan walked with Trond back up the hallway toward the door that led to the tunnel. Just thinking about it made him break out in a sweat. He breathed in and out steadily, huffing through his mouth and focusing on timing each breath with his right foot striking the hard ground as the two made their way through that awful, dark tunnel to the justice building.

“The justice building closes at nine o’clock every night and opens at sunrise,” Trond said. “You’ll be assigned to sit at the front door one night per month.”

“Is that the only way in?”

“No, there’s a gate on the side of the building. We lock and unlock it at the same time, but the public’s not allowed to use it.” Trond pointed to the darkened recess they’d passed earlier. “There’s a tunnel that leads out of the complex, but the door is blocked. Milad doesn’t want anyone going out at night to visit the brothels or taverns.” He winked with a sly grin.

Korlan wondered whether the wink was meaningful. Had this been his old Legion unit, there would have been a handful of men sneaking out every night, himself among them. The dark crampedness of the tunnel made him long for an ale.

“Say, you all right? Are you afraid of the dark?” Trond asked, looking him over.

“No, small spaces.”

The enforcer chuckled. “So is Gruesome. You wouldn’t know it to look at him or talk to him, but he gets all sweaty and quiet in here.”

“Who’s Gruesome?”

Trond was silent for a moment. “I forget his real name. He’s just... Gruesome. You’ll find out why we call him that once you’ve been here a while.”

Charming
, he thought.

“I’ll never forget the first time he showed me how to pluck and serve a fellow. The gleam in his eyes made me just as queasy as the punishment itself.”

Korlan wasn’t sure he wanted to know what plucking and serving was, but he asked anyway.

“Friend, I suggest you wait a couple of weeks, steel your gut a bit before you ask me that, but if you really want to know, I’ll tell you.”

“Never mind,” Korlan said. “I’ll wait.”

“It changes you,” Trond said quietly, as if to himself. “Having to do something like that to another man.”

Finally, his torment came to an end at the top of the stairs, and he rolled his head and shoulders to loosen them. Trond led the way to a room not far from the door, where a slender, bald adept with a sharp nose sat behind a desk. She looked up but didn’t return Korlan’s smile.

“Korlan Rastorfer?” she asked. On his nod, she said, “You’ll need to take your oath as a justice officer. Can you read?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She handed him a worn sheet of paper. “State your name, and then read it aloud.”

“Korlan Rastorfer. I hereby promise to hold the truth in the highest regard, to dedicate the remaining years of my service to Serocia to upholding the law and executing the punishments of convicted criminals decided by the elders of the Justice Bureau in the name of the king. This I swear upon the honor of my family name, Serocia, and the god Retar.”

“I witnessed Korlan Rastorfer’s oath,” the registrar said. She looked at Trond, who repeated her words, giving witness.

“Welcome to hell,” Trond said, slapping his back.

Funny. That’s what Corporal Pharson said when I joined the Legion.
He pushed a dim smile to his face and followed Trond back through the tunnel to the dormitory.

“How long have you been an enforcer?” he asked Trond, partly to keep his mind off the fact that the tunnel was collapsing and he would soon be crushed.

“Twelve years,” Trond said.

“Why so long? Did you reenlist?”

“No. My sentence was lifelong service. You got off easy with only having to serve the rest of your tour.”

“What was your crime?”

“Crimes,” Trond said. “And you don’t want to know. Let’s just say I’m grateful for the leniency the Legion showed me.”

Korlan focused on the candle flickering at the end of the tunnel. “Do you know what my first assignment’s going to be? I don’t have to whip Jora or anything, do I?”

Trond laughed. “Probably not.”

Two bells rang just as they reached the door. Only half an hour to go. Korlan’s stomach rumbled.

“You should shave your head before dinner,” Trond said. He opened a door, where a half-dozen men and women in white were folding sheets. “Can he get a pitcher of hot water?”

A scrawny man with short, black hair grabbed a metal pitcher, shuffled to the pair of stoves, and ladled steaming water into it. He added a couple of ladles of water from another tub and brought it to Korlan.

“Thanks.” The pitcher’s bottom was hot to the touch, and he carried it carefully by the handle to his room.

“See you in the dining hall at the next bell.” Trond left him to his business.

Korlan found a sharpened razor in the dressing table’s drawer, and a bar of soap was in the wash basin. He poured water in, lathered his head, and began to shave. He’d hated shaving his head at first but grew to appreciate the convenience of baldness after a few weeks. He had a good ten days’ growth on his head that he scraped off as carefully as his trembling arms could manage. He felt the sting of the razor a few times and blotted away the blood with the black prisoners’ shirt he’d left on the floor.

Finally, the dinner bell rang, and he ran upstairs, joining a stream of other enforcers. Most of them paid him little attention, but several eyed him up and down. Fewer still asked his name.

He loaded his bowl with food, as much as he could stuff in it, and took his tray to the large, open room that grew louder by the minute. Trond waved him over. Korlan shrugged to himself and joined Trond and four others at the table. He wouldn’t have chosen a man like Trond as his friend under most circumstances, but this was his life now. He welcomed every friend, every tip, every piece of advice he could get that would help him get through the next eight-and-a-half years.

Trond introduced him around the table and was greeted with a nod or begrudging “hello.” They certainly weren’t a friendly bunch, nor talkative. They shoveled food into their mouths as if they were every bit as hungry as Korlan was. Still, Korlan finished his meal before anyone else at the table.

“Is it all right to get seconds?” he asked.

His companions snorted. “You can try,” Trond said.

Justice Captain Milad paused behind one of the enforcers as he walked past with an empty bowl. “If you’re finished, Rastorfer, let’s talk about your first assignment.”

Korlan got to his feet and clambered over the bench, then picked up his tray. “I’m ready. Where do I take this?”

“Over here.” Milad led the way to a table where dirty bowls were stacked. Korlan added his bowl to the stack, tossed his spoon into the nearby bin, and set the tray on another table. Then he joined Milad in the corridor. “Come with me.”

Korlan followed Milad back through the tunnel. Though the justice captain wasn’t one for idle chatter, Korlan needed to occupy his mind during the minutes it took to traverse the tunnel.

“What’s my first assignment?” he asked.

“You’ll be guarding a couple of convicts during their sentencing trial. It’s easy work. You just stand behind them and make sure they don’t try to flee or attack any of the Sayers.”

“Got it.” Korlan hadn’t expected such an easy assignment, but it made sense they would want to test him before trusting him with more difficult tasks, and that was fine with him.

Chapter 8

Disciple Bastin was seated on a bench by the door to the dormitory waiting when Jora arrived. Two textbooks were stacked beside her.

“Sorry I’m late,” Jora said. “First the dominee–”

“I’m not interested in your excuses,” Bastin said. “You’ve wasted enough of my time already. Tell me what you remember about the six types of law.”

Jora sat on the other end of the bench and patted her thighs. “Well, let’s see. There’s law of property, family, business, finance, body, and kingdom.”

“Corpora,” Bastin corrected. “If a man hits his wife, which law family is broken?”

“Both family and corpora,” Jora said. “I remember that stuff.”

“All right, what about a man who steals another man’s horse and sells it to a third?”

“He’s broken laws of property and finance.”

“Good. Which carries the harsher penalty?”

Jora had to think for a moment. She remembered some of them seemed backwards to her, but she wasn’t sure if that was one. “Property?”

Bastin shook her head. “Reread chapter eight in Laws of Serocia part one.”

For the next half hour, she continued to grill Jora on the legal system, testing her memory of specific laws, penalties, and exceptions. When the second dinner bell rang, they took their meeting to the dining hall. Bastin talked passionately about the laws of corpora, touching on examples that were close enough to the issues brought up at Jora’s trial that Jora thought she was fishing for some tidbit of information, perhaps hoping Jora would volunteer to share something.

She hadn’t seen Bastin in the courtroom that day. At the time, she thought her former Disciple didn’t care enough to attend. Later, she discovered that Bastin had wanted to but was denied because of her mentorship.

By the time the third bell rang, the dining hall was empty but for the two of them. A stricken look came over Bastin’s face. “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“What’s the rush?” Jora asked as she clambered over the bench seat, then set her dirty bowl and spoon with the others.

A wave of enforcers flooded into the room. Most of them failed to notice the two women, but a few watched them with a dark hunger in their eyes.

Bastin grabbed the books in one arm and took Jora by the hand, dragging her through the sea of uniformed men. “Hurry,” she said, her voice pitched in panic.

They wormed their way through the doorway, squeezing past the men, and scurried down the hall toward the building exit.

“What’s wrong?” Jora asked as she hurried to catch up. She looked over her shoulder at the enforcers filing into the dining room, wondering if Korlan had been set free yet. She watched the faces for a moment, hoping to glimpse him.

“They’re… not like us,” Bastin said. “Don’t ever get trapped in the dining hall at the third bell.”

Jora laughed. When she’d first joined the Order of Justice Officials, her new friends Gilon and Adriel cautioned her not to linger after her meal and get caught with the enforcers at the third bell, but like entering after the first bell, she’d thought it more a rule than a warning. “Come on, Bastin,” she said in a teasing lilt. “They’re justice officials like we are. Why are you so scared of them?”