The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady (22 page)

This is all didactic as fuck, but it helps
explain the
High Five
. One in ten-thousand people are
mancers. One in twenty-five mancers are Ultras. Two in ten mancers
are First Tier. Calculate the odds against population totals and
the knowledge that the formulas don’t recognize modern national
cartography and it’s amazing to think the five of us were pushed
together, not to mention that Ceinwyn Dale found us or cajoled us
to come to the Asylum.

Heinrich Welf, Valentine Ward, Asa Kayode,
Miranda Daniels, King Henry Price. Did we cause problems . . .

[CLICK]

I stayed with Russell Quilt for probably
four more hours. Enough to see the fiftyish other kids come
through. No more Ultras, which ain’t all that rare. We make more
noise and the Asylum is actively looking for us. Ceinwyn’s told me
they figure on about twenty-five Ultras a year. My class had
thirty. Another rarity. You’d think someone would have sacrificed a
dove or something and known what was coming.

About a third of the Ultras are from
overseas, with probably dozens left unfound in shithole countries.
China’s gotten pretty good; India’s got an extra dosage of crazy
people they didn’t get in time. As far as Intras though, the Asylum
only has so much room. Once population reached a higher limit than
they can handle . . . well, kids have started to get abandoned to
whatever fate they find. Mancers with no one to teach them. Going
to go crazy just like my mom. Chance again, screwing over the poor
and weak. More than fifty a year and getting worse. Why should
normal schools be the only ones to do a shitty job? Sorry . . .
it’s a sore spot. It will be a sore spot when I’m a broken old man
. . . if I ever make it to being a broken old man.

So four hours of testing. I was actually
really good for fourteen-year-old-me. I think Ceinwyn Dale was
already trying to plant the seeds to turn me into a Recruiter even
back then. Or maybe it was the budding Artificer in me. All the
tools Quilt used were made by my fellows.

That’s the Artificer’s gift. Items of repeat
usage.

Seeing Quilt rummage through his stacks to
find the tool he’d need—then seeing him lose the tool and have to
look for it again ten minutes later—is interesting stuff.
Electromancers have to spin a wheel then stop the spin—something to
do with current control. Sciomancers put on a glowing cloak and are
told to stand a foot from a dark corner—hell if I know why. I even
saw another geomancer who failed what I’d passed. He couldn’t move
the magnets to within six inches of each other.

I was really good except for one teeny tiny
detail. Detox sucks. Quilt told me the same thing Ceinwyn Dale did.
No smoking on campus. Easy for him to say. I had a headache that
could split rocks . . . and without the Mancy to help it out. Even
an energy drink and a bag of chips he finally gave me to keep me
from passing out didn’t help. By the time the last kid went out the
door, I was thinking about smashing whole walls to bits. Forget
windows.
Walls!

“Please don’t,” Russell told me while
finishing up his lists.

“Huh?”

“Please don’t break anything.”

“Wha . . . I . . . you . . .”

He gave me a little smirk. Quilt’s little
smirk is about as mean as a Chihuahua. We used to have one at
home—so I know about the little
putas
. Yippie shits. It was
my middle sister’s—Jordan Josephine Price, or JoJo—but she took it
with her when she ran away from home about a year before my entry
into the Asylum. She was fifteen at the time. Wonder if she still
has the thing? Suppose she could, but it’d be ancient by now. Mean
little thing. His name was Coñando. But back to Quilt.

“I’m a mentimancer, K.H.”

“Like what?
Mind
guy?

“Yes. I wish we’d call ourselves
neuromancers, I wrote a paper on embracing modern styling
actually,” said the guy with a pen and a paper list. “But the
Asylum loves tradition . . . even if it tries to hide it.”

First time I heard the term, so I did what
you’d expect. “What’s the Asylum? Without math please.”

“Oh . . . yeah. Um . . .” He scratched his
brow. Simple answers are hard for Quilt. “Don’t tell the staff I
said it, but that’s what the kids call the place.

I liked it.

“So, mind guy.”

“Yes, K.H.”

“Can you make me do things?”

Didn’t like the thought of that.

“No . . . at least, I’m only an Intra, K.H.
Only reading and sending thoughts for me. Still valuable
though.”

“I’ll say.” Apparently, he was still
listening in—or my motives were obvious—because Quilt blushed.
“What about the Ultra ones like you?” Amazing how quick kids pick
up ideas. Of course, by that point my expectations had been beaten
down where I accepted anything. Probably helped that my mind’s the
type looking for any advantage it can find with new info.

“They’re called Mindmasters . . . the
strongest can suggest from what I understand, but mostly their gift
is reading and sending long term memory. Also valuable.”

Really didn’t like that.

“Any in my class?”

Quilt checked his list. He knew already by
heart but Russell Quilt is a guy who double checks and always gives
the right answer. “An exchange student from Dubai, Athir Al-Qasami.
Very wealthy family, excellent grades, very polite.”

“Oh bull-fucking-shit!”

Quilt frowned. “Don’t be like that.”

“You’re teaching some Arab kid to read
minds? He tries to screw with me I’ll choke him with his . . . um,
are they the ones with turbans?”

Quilt’s face had him at a step from calling
the PC police. “Listen . . . K.H, we teach every Ultra we can get.
A good number of your classmates are foreign. There’s a girl from
Nigeria, a boy from Mexico, another from Brazil. You’re going to
have to get along with them or you’ll be in trouble. More than even
you’re used to.”

I thought about that for a long while.

[CLICK]

Speaking of
long
, this went longer
than I thought it would. Excuse me as I get dinner. Suppose I don’t
have to tell this to an invisible listener but this stuff is still
new to me. So . . . fuck off, recorder.

[CLICK]

Ah . . . the joys of the poor bachelor and
late night fast-food runs. Oh, don’t blame me—a man can’t cook all
the time. Probably hasn’t helped that I got so used to someone at
the Asylum making my meals for me.

Case in point, Ceinwyn Dale walked into the
Testing Room while Quilt was attempting to distract my questions by
making me play some kind of card game with elves and swords and
crap. In her slim-fingered hands, she held a styrofoam meal holding
thingy. Take-out box. That what they called? We didn’t do take-out
at Shithole Price.

“Your dinner,” she told me, sitting it on
the cards and sending poor Quilt into another convulsive fit.

Opening it up, I found it a plate of Chinese
food. Also not a Shithole Price delicacy. Dad never got a hang of
it. Sweet and sour pork, eggrolls, and a heap of fried rice. Told
you the Cafeteria made good food. If Ceinwyn Dale is actually using
this tape for recruits, then make sure you try the fish tacos on
your first Friday and every Friday after that. I have no idea
what’s in the sauce but it tastes like a whole tree’s worth of lime
has been squeezed into it and distilled and then stuffed with whole
peppercorns.

“And where’s mine?” Quilt complained.

“In the Cafeteria, Russell,” Ceinwyn Dale
shot back, “You aren’t a child.”

“Neither am I,” got mumbled around a
mouthful of pork. “Want the extra eggroll, man?”

Quilt was going to turn me down. I saw it in
his eyes. Growing up like I did, you know how to read the eyes. You
learn how to know when the slap’s coming or learn to see if Mom’s
at home in that body of hers. Quilt was going to turn me down, but
then he got a nod from Ceinwyn Dale, so he took the food from me.
Guess she thought sharing’s a good sign.

The rest of the food went down quick, then a
goodbye to Quilt and out onto the school grounds with Ceinwyn Dale
again.

It was summer, so it wasn’t dark, but
getting long in the day. The grounds had kids and teachers still
but
they weren’t all huddling around the Admin building.
Brave Singles were checking out the school, returnees were hanging
in the Park or Field or wherever. Clothes were being changed from
street-wear to uniformed colors, where the street-wear would remain
locked in closets for eleven months.

For me, I didn’t see jeans except for two
exceptions in seven years. As far as uniforms went, necromancers
were walking around in their blacks like smarmy ninjas or assassins
or something equally trying-to-be-cool, while the poor
corpusmancers in red and white looked like a bunch of Santas after
a stay at the fat farm. Every discipline of the Mancy has their
uniform colors, I was happy mine didn’t make me look like a
douchebag. Brown it was.

“I’m an Ultra then.”

“Yes, King Henry.”

“What’s that mean? I get the special powers
and the seven years thing, but school wise? You wanted the interest
right? Here I am. Give me the spiel.”

Ceinwyn Dale glanced down at me. Given our
height differential, I suppose the
down at
is redundant. “It
means you’ll be given a special place, just like I told you before.
You’ll be entering a world of which only twenty-thousand people on
Earth are a part of.”

“That’s it?”

“I’m estimating. But, yes. We could all sit
in a large arena at least. The normal mancers . . . the Intras as
we call them . . . both the students and the teachers will be
either in awe of what you can accomplish with your powers or
jealous of it.” She stopped me with a hand as a class of Tri’s went
past us, led by their student-advisor. Standing with Ceinwyn Dale,
I already got funny expressions—proving her point, I guess.
“Whether it’s awe or jealousy will be up to how you act, how hard
you study, the choices you make.”

“That’s some serious crap to throw on a
fourteen-year-old kid, you know that?”

“We don’t expect you to be the chosen one .
. . just good at what your gifts are.” She smiled at me with the
grateful smile. Down again. Damn tall women. My whole life . . .
full of tall women.

Reaching out with the same slim-fingered
hands—that I swear I don’t got a thing for—she pinned an emblem on
my coat, next to my geomancer patch. The ring of thirteen stars.
The sign of an Ultra. Then she kissed my forehead . . .

I didn’t tear up and if Ceinwyn Dale tells
you differently she’s a liar. Okay. Maybe like . . . moist eyes.
Could have been from dust though.

She asked me if I’d like to see the dorms
and I think I nodded. I don’t remember saying nothing back to her.
I was going to live for the next seven years in the building, so
it’s a pretty big moment. What happens to big moments at the
Asylum, class? Yup, disappointment.

Once we were in the common room there was a
little bit of joy, however. “
Awesome
, a TV.”

“It’s controlled at the Administration
building, so don’t expect to pick up Pay-Per-View on it. You get
one preapproved movie a night.”

“Weak . . . Let me guess, seven years of
Harry Potter movies?”

“Sorry, King Henry. There’s not much time
for entertainment at the Institution of Elements, and the time we
do give you we feel would be better spent on more educated
forms.”

“Books?”

“With no pictures.”

“Weak . . . where the hell is everyone
anyway?”

Ceinwyn Dale and I were alone, inside what
would be my living space or jail-cell—depending on your point of
view—for the next four years of fourteen-year-old-me’s life. Don’t
know if I really have an opinion on it. It was a place to sleep.
Never really felt like home, not like my own graduate room would,
or even Plutarch’s house where I would spend many a night waking up
every hour to watch over some anima experiment, but I suppose the
Ultra dorm ranks ahead of my childhood shithole.

There was AC. Can’t beat AC. The two couches
curving around the front of the television were comfy—the kind you
could slowly sink into and almost disappear—the television itself
was new and modern, and the floor was polished wood, spotted with
thirteen carpets in the discipline colors to match our uniforms.
Behind the television there were four huge tables—the Study Tables
as they were known, though they supported more than a few games of
Texas Hold ‘Em in my day—then against the wall was a row of stalls,
computers with internet access, though limited internet access that
came in but didn’t go out. No escape, even the pixilated kind.

“Your class is having dinner,” Ceinwyn Dale
told me while she watched with those smiling eyes of hers.

“Huh . . .” I said with my amazing
vocabulary.

“Want to see the restrooms?”

“I guess . . . never saw one before you
know.”

“Smart ass.”

See . . . smart again.

Seen one restroom seen them all. There were
showers each for boys and girls, restrooms the same. All divided
into stalls for a fake sense of privacy. Psychologically, they
wanted you clean quickly, not messing around wasting time and
playing grab-ass. Or even playing kick-ass. So they made the
experience about as uncomfortably naked in a room with other naked
people as possible.

Ceinwyn Dale followed around behind me as I
walked back into the common room. My hand reached out to slide over
a table’s top, feeling the pits and pencil marks. “These things
look a million years old.”

“As old as the building,” was the answer I
got.

How old is the building? About ninety years
at that point. Too much explaining during this session however; so
shut the fuck up and go look up the history of the Asylum on your
own time. It will be under ‘
I
’ in the Asylum library.