Their second day of lectures had flown by, histories, algebra, geometry, calculus, all things familiar to Carryl yet new and interesting to Meredith. At the end of the day, before the dormitory, after Nannade had said her goodbyes to the two, Carryl turned to Meredith.
“May I ask you, Meredith, what you and Nannade had talked about yesterday, before I interrupted you?”
Meredith shrugged her shoulders. “Some stuff. I just noticed on campus that she was, y’know, off the beaten path too, so I invited her. She told me about Sturreland, how that place there is, she asked me about Watubara, but I don’t know anything of that place. That’s about it.”
In the presence of Nannade, Carryl had asked herself awfully little about her own roommate. “Well, how does it come that you are... “ Carryl looked for words for a moment.
Meredith giggled. “Oh you mean this?” She made a gesture towards her own face. “Just call me black, it’s not like nobody else ever did. My father is from Watubara. He came to the Gimean islands, met my mother and that’s it. There’s not much too it.” She smiled again that brilliant white, then headed to the common room. “Come on now, let’s distract ourselves. If I get any more excited for tomorrow, I’ll squeal like a little girl.”
The common room was already full of other students. Meredith sat down at a table of cards, it looked like chemins, a game Roy had once tried to teach Carryl, before he was heavily reprimanded by his mother for filling a girl’s head with such an un-lady-like game. She read in books then how to play and decided it was not for her, but Meredith observed closely how the boys were playing. Carryl moved on towards the kitchen. Siangwen was overseeing the students acting as famuli preparing dinner and needed no more hands, but when she turned around, Carryl saw a bag of grain on the countertop. She looked back and quickly snuck a few handfuls into her robe’s pockets. It was always good to have some grain on hand.
She went out to the common room and decided to get some reading done when she saw the elevator shaft. She had never been all the way up to the top of the building. The view would surely be amazing. She decided to try. Wynford got her up to the 9th floor, high above the pavement. The layout of rooms seemed to be the same on every floor, be it for girls or boys. She realized that all of the windows were in the rooms, of course. At the end of the hallways she found closets of cleaning utensils, bedsheets and tools and the windows showed her nothing but the wall of the next building across a narrow alley. She would have to go into one of the boy’s rooms to enjoy the view. She wanted to knock but decided against it, remembering how the boys of the founder’s lodge had flocked to her mere presence. Rumours of Carolinia of House Dwyllaigh asking boys for entry into their rooms was the last thing she needed.
Carryl sighed. She was about to accept defeat when she saw in the ceiling a hatch. It would lead up to the attic. From up there, maybe she could get onto the roof. Even if not, attics are dark and secret places, like those places in the castle on Bonhynys that she had explored so thoroughly. The hatch bore a rope grip on the underside and after just a little looking, she found the long hook to pull it down in one of the utility closets.
The hatch opened and the ladder attached to its inside slid down. Looking both ways of the hallways,Carryl made sure nobody saw her. Then she climbed up.
Utter darkness and heat greeted Carryl into the attic, the dryness sucked the water out of her skin, motes of dust drifted in and out of lone rays of light that poked through holes in the roof and fell upon the floorboards, where they exploded into spots of bright. Crates and bags piled up, heaps of sheets and bedding eaten to sieves by moths and up the walls reached shelves full of empty bottles, pots and baskets that waited for a purpose once again.
Carryl climbed all the way into the attic and closed the hatch behind her. She reached for the light vial around her neck and just then remembered she did not wear it any more, no point to do so when every building is flooded with light unlike her castle home's many dark cellars and fortress passageways.
Then she remembered the grain she had snuck from the kitchen. She put her hand in her pockets and felt the grain. She picked a single one, felt its surface and the life force within. She tried to separate that into vis viva and volit viva as Professor Tominet had hinted, but she felt only an entwined entity, no real beginning or end between its two parts. Throughout the years, she had always loved listening to the energy within, how it waited to emerge, to strive for the light, to build an existence for itself, like the echo of a thousand bells yet to ring. But it would not come so, Carryl had decided. She drew the ember of will from it. In her head she understood the heat, the fuel required for fire to spring forth.
She took a good fistful in her left hand and remembered her flame, that flame she had discovered in the light and warmth of a candle and sparks of her mother’s magic. She knew it well by now and how to entice it with the promise of the grain’s fuel. Then she squashed the will of life within it. A warm rasping sensation, like sand on the beach, pushed through her veins from her left hand, to her heart and there she kept it for a moment, like suppressing a burp from her stomach, then releasing it towards her flame.
It sprung up above her right palm, weak and flickering, but enough to cast an orange light and reveal her surroundings at least in a dimness sufficient to her.
A quick look around the attic showed her little of interest or value which the lone shafts of light had not already shown her. She moved around the room along the roof until she finally found what she had actually been looking for: a hatch to the outside. She grabbed the handle and within a few good shoves, it budged and opened to the outside.
Blinking, Carryl emerged into a copper brightness. She was facing east, towards the harbour. She took a step onto the roof and stood up. The wind was blowing just slightly, with that salty fragrance
She found a place to sit down and just take in the view for a while. Behind her, to the west was the setting sun above coastline, where sea and land met, waves of salty water and waves of grain swaying in the same wind.
Much of the city was built out of the regular wood and brick, where money was available to spend with speckless plaster or even murals. Official city buildings, temples and almost all of the campus, shone as white limestone. The scholar’s quarter most of all impressed with its facades. It was taller than any other quarter, a way of mages to show off their prestigious standing and save floor space at the same time. It might be the smallest quarter of the city by area, but it still housed as many people as some others, primarily students, staff and scholars of the Exalted Academy.
Left of Carryl, to the north, was the temple quarter, housing most prominently the temple to Her Holy Radiance. Its walls consisted of limestone columns and arcs that spanned the huge glass panes to let in as much of the sunlight as possible, brass-plated struts between shone like the gold of the sun in its setting light, the dome atop spanned like the veins of a leaf with glass instead of green. An extravagance of glass, limestone and brass that triumphed above even other temples of Her Holy Radiance elsewhere, which had to use mirrors of polished metal to capture and redirect the sunlight in want of the grandest glasswork on all of the continent. Not far from the temple was the plaza of the Communion of Sanctified Trade, two large semi-circular walks of tables under roofs that were more an open market than any temple of sorts, where merchants and other members of the Communion offered their wares to prizes appraised by priests for profits funding good deeds and services like orphanages or toll-free roads. Even from this far away, Carryl could see the merchants haggling and negotiation for the last wares of the day, a final chance to be granted good fortune.
Directly ahead of Carryl was the river Daune, or more specifically the delta arm Halonnes had been built at. Beyond that was the merchant’s quarter, where many of the wares coming up and down the river got either sold or worked. The harbour itself was shielded by an island in the river, bearing the most eye-catching and iconic building of all: the salt spire.
Its structure of arches upon arches, getting smaller, more numerous and more inter-connected as the spire rose higher, allowed the sunlight to flood past its stones that glittered and shone. Though she could not see it in detail from the distance, Carryl knew that it was made entirely by magically shaped limestone which was wrapped by a web of metal filaments like vines to an old brickwork wall, keeping it together and taught, reflecting the amber sun.
To her right, the tower of the abjuration faculty stood. In the evening light, the lantern-like appearance became even more apparent, as light was still lit behind those tall glass walls. It had only been that morning, but already, the event had slipped into the past. Something did not sit right with Carryl. She tried making sense of all the things she knew about that girl nannade.
Nannade was a name that sounded as if it came from Nagnastam, an island chain to the west and the homeland of the crolachans, at least those of the western type, as Nannade was with her brass coat, red mane and gold eyes. Outside of Nagnastam, Carryl did not know of many crolachans, the Gimean islands had quite a few, valued sailors and lovers of rocky cliffs. The cold, harsh winds bothered the furred people little. On the continent, however, they were even rarer. Sturreland was ruled mainly by the mediums of the Lodge of Sturreland, not part of the Pact of Exaltation. Instead, it was the mystics of nature that ruled the land, as Nannade had admitted, even if indirectly. Underdeveloped, barely explored and most of all, ancient was the heart of the continent. What ores and gems waited in those mountains nobody may say, the stubborn people there mine only what they need and sell only grain and lumber and some pelts. Their iron breaks easily, their weapons cant keep an edge, their armour consists of leather. Yet they resisted empires that built citadels and canals.
And then there was the next element of the mystery: Monsieur Garetas. His physique would scare the bouncer of any tavern, his staff spoke of an accomplished combatant who never served in a war. Some security expert, possibly, a bodyguard for the powerful and valuable. Things started to come together for Carryl. It was common practice to send children of noble bloodlines to other houses to be raised there, strengthen diplomatic ties and educate them in many ways. The iron doctrine of House Dwyllaigh to raise all children at the fortress on Bonhynys is often criticized, but the Lord Father was moved little. Despite the gift of the mystic not travelling through generations by blood, it could very well be that the children of the priesthood of Nagnastam sent their youngest away as well, apparently far overseas. If that was true, it would only be logical for Nannade to be then sent to an Exalted Academy as well, placed under the protection of someone capable to defend her from any harm.
Carryl noticed that she smiled. She had solved the puzzle. Maybe it was even the explanation for more things, like her reservation to talk to people. She might have learned that forming friendships was futile when she would be sent away again anyway.
“Friendship? Friendship, huh?” Carryl whispered to herself. Was there really friendship? Not for her, no, but for Meredith, surely. Carryl knew not where she would go. Halonnes had always been her destiny, for sure, but now that she was here, where to?
The contemplation was cut short when a cold wind blew her way. The sun was about to set, casting its last red rays on the Salt Spire and Carryl realized she would get to see the spectacle up close this time. The shadow of the city wall crept upwards and where the light stopped touching the limestone arches, the surface seemed to bellow up in steam as thick and white as the stone itself. It rose, driven by an unseen force, faster than any steam Carryl had ever seen before, almost as if blown by a strong updraft. More and more of the Salt Spire was untouched by light, from the ground up and as the steam followed the structure, it intertwined in a movement that created light within like thunder inside a distant cloud that hung above the ocean, but not sudden and momentarily, but soft and steady. The steam rose further along the limestone structure, faster with every inch until it shot into the sky as a torrent of luminous white, crashing upon an unseen layer of the sky and widening like the milk that little Carryl tried to sneak into her cup would spill onto and across the tiled kitchen floor.
From the distance, the spectacle had been impressive, a beacon of civilisation and progress, the might of the League embodied in stone and light, but up close, Carryl felt different, she felt intimidated, tiny, insignificant in the face of this power.
After having marvelled quite some time more than she would have guessed, Carryl remembered that she was not actually supposed to be on the roof and that dinner would soon be served. She stood up and walked toward the hatch which she now noticed had no handle on the outside. She tried grasping it some other way, but even when she managed to get her nails into the wood, the hatch would not budge. Some kind of mechanism was holding the hatch closed from the inside.
Carryl was trapped on the roof.
