Sesus Ayame, con't.
THE HOUSE OF BELLS
I wrote my parents precisely once, to inform them of my whereabouts and actions. I’m fairly certain they already knew, but I thought I owed them at least that much courtesy. I expected nothing from them - I had, after all, gone out of my way to defy them. Nor did I really want anything of them. If I was a profound disappointment to them, they were at least that much to me.
Six weeks into my first season at Bells, I was summoned to the Commandant’s office just after breakfast. There, he presented me with a very formal letter, covered in official scarlet seals and the personal mons of several Imperial judges, the sitting members of House Ledaal’s ruling body, and my parents. Within it was the formal declaration of my disinheritance, rendering me in truth what I had already implied on my admission papers: outcaste, without family or House.
I was not overly surprised. Neither, apparently, was the Commandant, who informed me that, irregularities with my admission procedure aside, I had fairly won my place at the House of Bells and I would not be deprived of it now. Left unspoken was the implication that I could be if I wasn’t careful, and so I resolved to be very careful, indeed. This turned out to be more easily said than done. The ten “charity admissions” were not segregated in our own unit, but everyone nonetheless knew who we were. With the exception of Avaku, none of us were distinguished by a Great House’s name, and four of us hadn’t even been born on the Isle. Scattered among the first year training Dragons, we were easy pickings of the harassment of our more fortunate peers, and easy targets for Bells’ particularly brutal methods of weeding out the weak.
I wasn’t weak, but it took quite a bit of unsubtle convincing before the thickest of my classmates realized this. Once they did, however, there was no more trouble between me and them: we knew we could trust one another, to pull weight, to pick up slack, and to support the scale, the talon, the wing, the Dragon. We became comrades, if not friends. I wasn’t ready for friends, and at that time I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to be again - loneliness is easier to endure than loss.
The harassment, on the other hand, was more persistent and a thousand times more irritating. I had been gifted with an education in nasty tempers and cruel dispositions and, even so, I found the attitudes of some of peers thoroughly insufferable. Many of them seemed to feel entitled to my groveling submission, or at least my unearned respect. Many more seemed to take umbrage at my presumption of personal worth. Even more thought they had something to prove, and wanted to do so on the hide of another. Ragara Tiaan was one of these, a would-be warrior from a House of accountants. To give him the credit he deserves, his skill and his ego were pretty equally matched. Unfortunately, his need to win outstripped both by a considerable margin and tended to interfere with his ability to admit when he was fairly beaten. We had the sort of relationship wherein he regularly struck for my face after time had been called in our sparring matches, and I regularly crab-walked him around the ring in the most humiliating restraining hold I could manage. Toward the end of our basic training season, he seemed to find his inability to break my nose with impunity absolutely maddening and redoubled his efforts in that regard. Short stave practice, as I recall, and he hit me hard enough to partially reopen my scar. Earth Aspects without sufficient temperance to govern their more volatile passions really are more dangerous than even the most hot-headed Fire Aspect. In return, I dislocated both his shoulder and his elbow, and broke his wrist to emphasize my displeasure. This little exchange earned us both formal reprimands for conduct unbecoming but, by then, I at least didn’t mind a little discipline.
The first season at Bells is basic training for all first-year cadets and has the highest washout rate of any of the great academies. No matter how hard-assed your primary school is about physical education, nothing you learn sparring on the athletic fields can prepare you for basic training at Bells. It cracks many an otherwise adequate cadet and hardens the ones who don’t break for what comes after. Despite my own occasional doubts about my own fitness, I hadn’t broken, and neither had I gotten myself disciplined out the front gate. I had, I felt, survived the one trial I had most feared and now at least I knew I could take what came next. In a way, I almost felt that just surviving basic had validated the faith that Andvari and Nikia had had in me, and that knowledge also helped me going forward. I hadn’t embarrassed the dragon-held spirits of the two people I loved most, and that helped assuage the guilt I felt for not even being able to mourn them properly. I spent that Calibration thinking about my future, the track I wanted my military training and career to take. At that time, I didn’t consider myself particularly excellent command material. Additionally, officership required, then and now, a certain amount of means, which I sorely lacked. I signed up for the school’s “volunteer adjutant” program, which is one way a cadet can earn both a little extra jade and a little more experience, gophering for the resident faculty and whatever special instructors were on base for that year. I suggested to my academic advisor that I was interested in sorcery and she reviewed my records and made noncommittal noises about my class schedule.
Air Season started regular classes in addition to ongoing physical conditioning and Essence control drills. I was pleasantly surprised by my schedule, which included foundational classes for the would be combat sorcerer, and by the guest faculty that year. General Sesus Heshiko was teaching a number of courses and I sat two of them, Military History of the Dragon-blooded Shogunate and Practical Small Unit Tactics Foundational Level. To say this filled me with - dare I admit it? - absolute glee of the highest possible order is actually something of an understatement. Moreover, no one in my scale had washed out and so I ended up studying with people I knew weren’t idiots. In truth, I was so busy I more or less completely forgot about Tiaan and his assorted minions. I was finally taking classes that challenged me intellectually and the physical training continued apace. Very much to my surprise, I was placed in an assistantship with General Heshiko, whom I had thought would want an older cadet for his student adjutant. I fear I had to exert some fairly iron self-control to avoid self-inflicted wounds of hero-worship whenever I was in his presence for the first few weeks, though this thankfully moderated itself eventually. Additionally, the group combat exercises became much more intensive, less focused on weeding out the weak than encouraging the development of unit cohesion, particularly at the scale level.
My scale consisted of myself, two Cathaks (Zurvan, Fire; Ariara, Earth), a Tepet (Straton, Air, of course) and Mnemon Katenan, Aspected Wood. We had been thrown together by random assignment at the beginning of basic and, by dint of a great deal of hard work, a modicum of collective skill, and probably a bit of luck, none of us had washed out -- and so, while some scales were adjusting to the integration of new members or being dissolved and recreated entirely, our unit was one of the few in our training Dragon that remained completely intact as we transitioned into more advanced training. Zurvan and Ariara were close kin -- first cousins, whose mothers were sisters born unusually close together in years by Dynastic standards, who had been reared nearly as brother and sister. Straton, by the grace of the Dragons, bore no resemblance whatsoever to Andvari in either form or attitude, deriving as he did from one of House Tepet’s hereditary military households -- he seemed to believe, as a matter of profound personal faith, that his mere association with the rest of us was a gift for which we were never properly or adequately grateful.
Mnemon Katenan was, I confess, something of a singular mystery to me practically from the moment we first met. House Mnemon does not, as a generality, place a significant emphasis on military service as a mode of life for its members -- it’s not an unacceptable approach to serving the Realm so much as an inferior one given the depth of Mnemon’s interest in, and one would suggest, direct and self-evident control over such institutions as the Heptagram and the Immaculate Order. And yet Katenan was one of the most enormously competent members of our entire training Dragon -- capable of feats of unarmed combat, with or without Essence, that regularly saw him sitting on top of the instructors’ weekly commendation lists. Practically anyone else would have strutted about that fact until someone broke one or more of his limbs but Katenan rarely acknowledged such things at all much less in a manner that could lead others to take offense. He was, in truth, a very quiet, private person -- self-contained and self-disciplined as few others of our age could even pretend to be, Bells cadets or not. I found myself, very much against my will, liking him -- he was my most regular sparring partner in many arenas physical and intellectual, and also the lucky person assigned to help me address my deficiencies in knowledge when it came to common Charm forms I should have learned years earlier. In this, he was infinite in his patience and had no fear of teaching me by beating me soundly around the practice ring if that was what needed to be done. You have not had your ass kicked until you’ve had it kicked by a Wood Aspect trying to teach you Gracefully Yielding Willow Form in the most direct and expedient way possible. Outside of our standard small unit training, I saw more of him in an academic context than all the other members of our scale put together -- we sat the foundational combat sorcery classes together (at which he also excelled), Military History of the Dragon-blooded Shogunate, and several others besides. We spent more than one night studying together into the small hours and then keeping each other focused at small unit drill the next morning.
Tepet Straton, to no one’s surprise, appointed himself the natural leader of our scale and to give him the credit he deserves, he was not incompetent at the task. He was also not prepared to command in any manner that deviated even slightly from the forms proscribed by generations of Tepet military tradition and the Thousand Correct Actions of the Upright Soldier, which I suspect he was required to memorize before he graduated primary school and possibly before he even left for primary school. To a certain extent, this rigidity of thinking served him well in tactical exercises modeled on principles illustrated by those sources -- but all of our exercises were not so modeled, particularly not the ones designed and executed by General Heshiko, who freely made reference to both the Thousand Correct Actions and his own wealth of real-world combat experience when it came to establishing the objectives and constraints of any particular exercise. I will confess that this approach caught me by surprise the first time I saw it -- the second time, I recognized the tactical and strategic configuration of the field during the Second Battle of Ten Thousand Withering Blossoms with a little bit of General Cathak Cynnara’s Most Efficacious Method of Breaking Out From An Untenable Encircled Position thrown in for good measure. Pointing this fact out to Tepet Straton proved significantly less effective than, once his entrapment-escape plan had failed, regrouping the survivors, and executing my grandfather’s rather more risky variant...which, admittedly, also failed, mostly because we lacked the troop strength necessary to pull it off by that point. But my approach came closer to actual success than his did, points and commendations were allocated accordingly, and I’m fairly certain that was when he decided that being one-upped by an outcaste, even if we both ultimately lost, was more than his honor could endure.
On the other hand, nearly succeeding where Straton had failed caused a shift within the dynamics of our scale that I was also not entirely prepared to deal with. Prior to that point, Zurvan and Ariara had both treated me with the sort of distant cool courtesy that well-bred young Dynasts bestow upon those infinitely far beneath them socially but whom they are required by virtue of kinship in the Dragons to treat with some dignity. Ariara wanted to know how I had recognized the conditions in play and Zurvan why I had elected to commit so much of our piecemeal force to the multi-point feints and, once they had acquired my sources for that information, Ariara at least realized that Winglord Ledaal Catala Ayame, the officer who commanded the action at Ten Thousand Blossoms, was close kin to me. After that, she frequently came to join Katenan and I in our study sessions and Zurvan, her loyal shadow, followed. It was not the same thing as the cautious friendship I had developed with Katenan, but it was something closer to genuine respect for my abilities than they had shown before -- and it was not something I was entirely comfortable facing. I did not, at that point, consider myself the most natural leader for our scale -- that was still Straton, who had both considerable skill and a legitimate military pedigree -- and, until then, I had never been in a position of actual leadership responsibility. Before Andvari had come to the Rock, I was an enormously dedicated loner; afterwards, I was, for all practical purposes, his loyal shieldbearer. I was not sure I wanted that responsibility, not yet, and particularly not if it meant disrupting a functioning team dynamic.
Have you ever tried to not lead if others have decided to follow you?
Yes, exactly.
Straton, it seemed, accepted the change with extraordinary grace. He was, I thought, both pragmatic and results-oriented enough that we could and did work together -- we shored up each others’ weaknesses and enhanced one another’s strengths, and I went out of my way to make certain he received all due credit and commendation for his work and efforts. But the damage had already been done.
At some point during Descending Air, while the entire academy was preparing for the end-of-Season wargames and subsequent testing cycle, Tepet Straton and my old friend Ragara Tiaan made common cause -- the cause being making certain that a number of people they both cordially despised did not darken the halls of their school for another Season. I was not the only person on their list, but I was the one they most wanted to see utterly publicly humiliated as well as driven forth -- or, at the very least, that was Katenan’s theory at the time. He’s never revised that theory and I have never had any particular cause to question his methodology on the issue.
The end-of-Season wargame that year was attended by a rather higher than average number of accidents. At the time, it didn’t seem particularly strange -- Descending Air was brutally cold that year, even in Arjuf, and the storms that rolled in off the sea brought actual snow along with the more normal sleet and freezing rain. The designated game arena was, to put it delicately, an ice-coated layer of Malfeas long before any of us set foot in it and the day the game started, a storm roared in that laid a fresh foot of snow on the proceedings the night of the first major engagement, which was conducted in the midst of conditions that could be charitably described as sub-optimal. The fact that the defensive positions held as well as they did was a function of impaired offense as much as any skill of our own -- the proctors, including General Heshiko, opted not to call an early halt, on the grounds that actual field conditions were rarely optimal and being able to cope with that was an important part of competent command. The senior class offensive ran out of steam some time before midnight, the standard exercise cut-off time, by which time the underclass defensive positions were basically holding ground on pure stubbornness, as well. It wasn’t until unit muster and analysis the next morning that the extent of the casualties incurred by both sides came to light -- actual casualties, not the Essence-tagged “dead” and “wounded” whose presence or absence became tactical factors as the exercise proceeded. Cathak Ariara and sixteen other members of our Dragon were evacuated back to the academy for emergency medical care -- some for exposure-related injuries, others for actual wounds incurred during the mock combats. Ariara was one of the latter, her sword-arm broken and one of her knees badly wrenched during a particularly vicious assault on our position. Zurvan had gotten himself badly bloodied coming to her defense, but remained, as did Katenan, Straton, and I. Before the exercise was over, nearly a two dozen others in the underclass defensive units were remanded to medical evacuation, a severe compromise to our numbers that necessitated a reorganization of forces and several ultimately pointless arguments among the commanders about the equal necessity of altering our defensive strategy -- elastic defense was out of favor in current doctrine, and arguing in support of it was effectively a waste of breath. The seniors pounded us without mercy, broke our lines, and at least we all got to go back to base without anyone losing any extremities to frostbite, which was I thought the best that could be asked for when surrounded by idiots.
It was also a test to see how much Straton, Tiaan, and their conspirators could get away with almost directly under the noses of upperclassmen and instructor-proctors, as many of the accidents were not so very accidental, though pretty much no one realized it at the time. I remain surprised to this day that no accident befell me -- but I suppose that arranging for me to quietly break my neck in the middle of a cold, dark, dangerous mock combat exercise would have achieved the goal but defeated the point.
My sixteenth birthday arrived four days into Ascending Water -- a fact that I shared with no one but which was known by at least two. Katenan tucked an elegantly calligraphed and painted card into my books at some point, which I found during the course of morning classes. I didn’t bother to ask him how he had found out -- Katenan knows everything was rapidly becoming a piece of conventional wisdom throughout the entire Dragon. General Heshiko’s aide-de-camp found me between classes and cordially requested that I attend him during the late dinner hour that evening, which request I accepted, despite it not being one of my scheduled evenings to do so.
I would like to state, unequivocally, at this point my relationship such as it was with General Heshiko was of an entirely professional character, in keeping with the vast gulf between his rank and my own. He had not, to my own knowledge, regarded me with any particular favor nor did he treat me with any -- in fact, if anything, he maintained a cool bordering on cold distance with all of his students, his personal student adjutant notwithstanding. While I was functioning in that capacity, he assigned me tasks and I performed them with exacting attention to detail, the results of which he accepted or corrected as they deserved. I did not disclose any details regarding the House of my birth or my parentage to him -- he had instructor-grade access to all the personnel files and could have found out anything he wanted to know without any interference from me. And, frankly, I didn’t want any special treatment from him, even while I was in the throes of starry-eyed hero-worship. It was enough to learn from him and keep forging my own path -- anything else, anything less, felt like a visceral betrayal of all I had done to that point, to say nothing of unethical and an actual violation of both school and Legion regulations. At the same time, it was almost frightening how much I wanted his approval -- how much I wanted to hear him say “well done, Cadet” in that cool, calm way that felt better than a proclamation from the Empress herself and which was ardently sought after in every class level lowest to highest. He was, after all, a living Hero of the Realm.
General Heshiko lived in the general staff quarters accorded to visiting faculty -- a part of the permanent base facilities that actually possessed a reasonable modicum of privacy. I presented myself at the required hour and was ushered in by his aide who directed me to the General’s private veranda, a part of his suite into which I had never previously set foot. My duties usually kept me in his public offices in the outer portion of the suite, where he frequently abided until fairly late in the evening accepting visitors. The veranda overlooked the inner courtyard of the general staff building, though at that time the doors were closed and the shutters drawn, the space lit by ceiling lanterns, a fire burning in the private hearth along with several braziers to ward off the cold. Two tables occupied the bulk of the space -- one laid with the place settings of a meal for two, the other with a map of Creation, including the Threshold, covered with carved and painted wooden counters, representing the deployed military units of the Realm, and the known or presumed deployments of our allies and our enemies. The General was not yet present and so I took up position next to the map table at parade rest, trying with minimal success not to look at the seals on the pieces of correspondence lying folded shut at one corner -- I assumed that I was to attend the General at a private meal with another member of the faculty, most likely for educational purposes. Adjutant officers are frequently required to execute such service with a high level of interpersonal skill and politesse which I frankly felt I lacked; my palms were rather damp with nerves despite the lingering chill in the air.
The General arrived fifteen minutes later, leaning heavily on the reinforced white jade cane that he used to walk. He had suffered an injury years before that had all-but destroyed the function of his left leg, leading to its amputation at the knee and replacement with a prosthesis and to the cold and damp causing the remaining bone and muscle and scars considerable discomfort. I immediately came forward to assist him into a chair -- real chairs of heavy carved wood and silk cushions -- which he accepted, though he dragged over the stool he used to rest his leg with the end of his cane. Then, to my very great surprise, he gestured for me to sit, as well. It took me a moment to process what that gesture meant and by the time I did the food was already being delivered by a procession of staff attendants. Hot tea and chestnut soup, roast waterfowl sliced thin and served over a bed of fragrant spiced rice and winter vegetables, a salad of pickled vegetables dressed in herbed oil, and for dessert a tart of dried plums, goat cheese, and toasted nuts, served with honeyed fruit juice. It was, by far, the best meal I had eaten in years -- the Rock’s institutional cuisine was indifferent to such subtle nuances as “flavor” and “texture,” and the Bells kitchens produced nourishing food in bulk that was at least edible but fairly monotonous in its sameness. Between courses, the General asked me questions -- fairly pointed questions, about my impressions of life in the House of Bells thus far, my classes, my instructors, the way in which felt the Dragon was developing, and, finally, about my plans for the future. It felt, I confess, like an extremely pleasant interrogation, for the General’s manner did not warm beyond distantly, professionally interested, nor did he ask any questions about my life before my arrival at the House of Bells. I answered him somewhat cagily at first, attempting to comprehend his intent, and more freely and openly by the end, his unchanging manner actually putting me more at ease than any more expressive display might have.
The next morning, at breakfast, I was summoned to the offices of my Dragon’s faculty advisor, where I received an adjusted class schedule for Water Season, which now included Intermediate Level Small Unit Command classes with General Heshiko. I was...surprised, to say the least, but not surprised enough to refuse the change. Additionally, the General began requiring my attendance more regularly, both in his public offices and privately, during converse with other members of the faculty about matters outside the school over his map-table. I had lived since early childhood wrapped in a bubble of institutionalization that I wasn’t even aware existed until his efforts punctured it -- listening to the conversations of the school command staff did more to educate me with regard to current events in the world outside the borders of my existence than all the classes I had attended thus far. I was, again, utterly immersed in the process of learning, so much so that I was utterly oblivious to the social dynamics within the Dragon and the scale continuing to shift, and in a direction that did not favor my position. Being advanced into Intermediate level command class did not win me any friends -- particularly since it was a full level skip -- nor did my position, as Water Season progressed, atop the class rankings. By mid-Resplendent Water, I was ranked second in my class -- first in my Dragon -- behind only Tepet Marek Devika, who was several different kinds of military genius prodigy, and the two of us several steps higher than the next-nearest competition.
This was extraordinarily offensive to a startlingly large number of people. I was outcaste, after all, a fact that I had almost begun to forget -- a dangerous forgetfulness.
The Descending Water wargames saw Devika and I placed in command of the underclass Dragons. It does, to this day, stand out in the history of the House of Bells as the only time the underclassmen defeated the seniors in a major all-school wargame engagement -- winning the entire wargame and not simply smaller actions within that game. Devika, as it turns out, agreed with me about the versatility of elastic defense but had not been in command position the season prior. It took us -- mostly Devika, I admit, as she possessed a level of social acceptance among our peers that I lacked -- a great deal of time and effort to bring our Winglords into concurrence with our line of thinking but, by the time we brought out our maps and began explaining the specific strategy we had in mind, they were for the most part on board. Straton and Ariara were my Wings -- Ariara selected Zurvon for her Talon and Katenan went with Straton, an unfortunate development for Straton and his co-conspirators, for that was when Katenan realized that something untoward was going on and, by dint of his own massive personal competence, managed to ameliorate at least some of it during that particular game. The seniors were not prepared for elastic defense and asymmetrical opportunistic attack -- they were not expecting to find themselves subject to a running battle of attrition where they lost three to our one. They were not expecting to have one of their commanders captured on the opening day of the games and held as a prisoner of war for the duration. They did not, to their credit, actually surrender but fought to the end, by which time their total force complement had been reduced by more than half in terms of captives, killed, and wounded unable to fight. This was, in many ways, a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it improved my position with those who had previously not had negative feelings towards me. On the other, it only deepened the antipathy of those who already despised me -- many of my peers, as it turned out, resented “owing” such a victory to one they considered unworthy, even if responsibility was shared with another. The seniors went back to the academy in a state of shock; the underclassmen in triumph with discontent simmering just beneath the surface.
By this time, Katenan was already deeply suspicious and, unlike me, was fully attuned to the shifting internal landscape of our Dragon and its society. He could prove nothing, and so he said nothing, but he kept careful track of individuals who seemed to be especially vulnerable and how they had fared in the game. An unusually high incidence of these individuals came away physically wounded -- two so much so that they were forced to leave the school entirely in order to convalesce. Four more failed the end of Season examinations and were washed out of the academy for displaying a pattern of poor performance. One of these was a charity admission who had gained entrance to the House of Bells at the same time I had, others were the Dragon-touched children of non-Dynastic Threshold potentates that could afford the academy’s admission fees. He told me later that he suspected a pattern was forming and that I was somehow a part of it, but he could not quite see how -- no attempt to render me incapable of continuing by gross physical force was made, the injuries I sustained during games and practice were all fairly minor, and while there was muttering about “uppity outcastes with ideas above their station” aimed at me, the success of the Water Season games had actually silenced some of my critics. It became necessary, at this point, for Straton and Tiaan to act before I could actually accrue any popularity that might disrupt their plans.
It began very simply and very elegantly -- Straton’s work. He was always the better tactician of the two, which is why I favored him as my Wing in the first place. I was summoned one pleasantly springlike day in late Ascending Earth to the office of my Dragon’s faculty advisor -- Sesus Kajak Paras. General Paras was a senior member of the Kajak line of House Sesus, retired to a teaching position after many years of honorable service in the Threshold, and like many of his House an Aspect of Fire. He questioned me about my recent activities: my classes, my adjutantship, when and where I had been studying and with whom. His tone was not hostile or confrontational, but the entire conversation made the hair on my neck stand at attention, and he dismissed me with an indication that I might be called in to discuss “these matters” again. I did not see what the “matter” actually was, and went away from the meeting ill at ease. Two days later I received a summons from the Commandant of the Academy, General Tepet Vergus Irivan. When I arrived in his office, I found General Irivan being attended not only by General Paras but also General Peleps Najalin Dhanavari, the Prefect of Discipline. I was, to put it mildly, rather alarmed by this development. General Dhanavari questioned me a second time about my recent activities -- more specifically about where I had been, as well as when and with whom. Underclassmen operate under extremely restrictive regulations even when it comes to liberty watches and liberty days -- only upperclassmen are permitted off-base and only then with a pass issued by their Dragon’s advisor and countersigned by the Commandant. Attempting to leave the academy grounds without such a pass for any reason other than wargames is grounds for formal discipline. This was the direction of my thinking as I answered General Dhanavari’s questions but I quickly realized that was not the reason for this gathering. Her questioning quickly narrowed down to how often and when I attended General Heshiko. I was not permitted to ask any questions of my own and I was dismissed no wiser than I had been before.
I had not, however, been specifically ordered not to speak to anyone else about it and I so I immediately set out to rectify my ignorance with the one person who did, legitimately, seem to know everything: Katenan. I found him in the academy library, his favorite haunt on liberty watches, explained the situation to him and was gratified that he found it as alarming as I did. He promised he would nose about and see what he could learn, and insisted that I should proceed as normal with my scheduled activities. We would meet again the next evening. I spent the next day in a state of barely-restrained nervous tension -- it was all I could do not to blurt something out to General Heshiko after one of his classes or that afternoon in his office as I fetched references from his personal library and ground ink. Katenan and I met that evening in one of the study rooms off the main library floor, one with a door, which he closed behind us, his expression grim. The long and short of it was this: the General Staff had received an anonymous accusation that General Heshiko was engaging in “conduct of a reprehensible and immoral nature in violation of both the Uniform Code of the Legion and the regulations of the House of Bells,” and that he was doing so with a student at least nominally under his command. Given the direction of the questioning I had undergone, we both knew that the student implicated in this accusation was me.
This was...an extremely serious accusation. Technically, fraternization within the ranks of the cadets was also forbidden by Bells regulations -- but it was one of those regulations that the General Staff had long ago decided to cut their losses on, the student body of Bells principally consisting of hormonal teenagers whose naturally occurring tendencies toward gonadal excess were regularly inflamed by violence and infusions of Essence. I am firmly convinced to this day that the only reason the mess didn’t serve contraceptive tea with every meal were the Imperial edicts banning long-term impairment of fertility -- contraceptive brews and barrier prophylactics were freely available without question at the infirmary, and discreet liaisons between cadets of the same or opposite sex were quietly overlooked as matters of discipline. By way of contrast, indiscreet liaisons between cadets -- or, worse, liaisons that resulted in pregnancy -- were cause for expulsion from the academy, and both parties being barred for life from holding a commission in the Legions. For even further contrast: the regulations barring fraternization between cadets and faculty were jade-clad and rigorously enforced. Unlike other elite-level secondary schools, where warming a teacher’s bed barely constituted a gossip item, at Bells it was a violation of both academy and Legion regulations, effectively treated as a form of treason, as sleeping one’s way to the top compromised the integrity and effectiveness of the Realm’s first line of defense, the Legions themselves. It was grounds for immediate expulsion with prejudice for the student and a permanent and irrevocable lifelong ban on military service of any kind. For the officer it meant it discharge in the deepest state of dishonor, forfeiture of rank, honors, and pension, and prejudice against the efforts of any children attempting to enter military service, mutable only by the most extreme measures. Only three times in the history of Bells had those regulations been broken and miserable fates of the perpetrators were circulated as cautionary tales with every new class of cadets.
I would like to say that I absorbed the implications of this with serenity and immediately set about constructing an ingenious plan to entrap the accusers of the General, and by extension myself, but I’m afraid that I cannot in honesty do that. I was first stunned and then appalled and then actively sickened -- the trap, after all, was elegantly well-constructed. How do you prove a negative, after all? I wasn’t having an affair with General Heshiko -- in fact, at that point, I had never had any sort of sexual relationship with anyone, at all, ever. But who would believe that? I was an outcaste, after all, and prejudice against “eggs from without the nest,” though I’d spent my entire life on the Isle reared in the bosom of a Great House, was such that any presumption of integrity was ephemeral at best, easily undone and difficult if not impossible to rebuild. And I had already established myself as one who would place my personal goals above all else -- the will of my parents, the needs of my House, actively defiant to the very end. I knew that any protestations of innocence on my part would not be believed -- why would they be? And General Heshiko’s life and career would be irrevocably tarnished at best, destroyed at worst, the worst sort of collateral damage.
Katenan, Dragons love him, made me sit down and put my head between my knees and exhorted me, at considerable length, not to do anything stupid. Told me to give him a day, two at most, to investigate further. The General Staff was also still investigating, and they would not destroy the career of a Hero of the Realm precipitately -- if a formal accusation was to be made, it would not happen until that investigation was complete. He made me promise him in the name of Daana’d that I would take no action until I next spoke with him. Even then, he knew me well -- he told me, later, that I’d been as transparent as a reflecting pool when it came to my hero-worship of General Heshiko. I didn’t precisely sleep that night, laying in our barracks with visions of disaster and disgrace for a man I’d admired my entire life dancing in my head. I intended to keep my promise to Katenan, but I could also see no way out of this situation that did not end either my incipient career or General Heshiko’s storied one, and I resolved that I would fall on my own sword before I permitted the General to come to dishonor in order to do me harm.
Nonetheless, I resolved to keep my word to Katenan and wait at least a day or two before I did anything that could be called foolish. That resolve was tested almost at once, in the mess hall at breakfast the next day. I did not normally pay much heed to gossip -- it was usually the sort of petty backbiting that had always irritated me, even there -- but that morning the atmosphere around the tables was different. Tenser. Cathak Ariara looked several times at me from across the room as though she wished to approach me and speak, but did not do so, itself an unusual occurrence. I heard General Heshiko’s name mentioned more than once as I passed hissing knots of my classmates and upperclassmen alike -- but not my own. My entire indifference to idle socialization had me pinned between the anvil and the hammer -- any sort of inquiry, no matter how casual or of whom, would have attracted more attention than anything else I could have done. In the back of my mind, I appreciated how elegantly the author or authors of this situation had used my vulnerabilities to limit my maneuvering room, even as I wanted to tear their lying tongues out at the roots.
I passed the reminder of tht day in a state of moral agony, eased only by the lack of classes with the General and no scheduled duties in his service. The next day was far more difficult since I sat a history class with him in the afternoon, preceded by two full meals in which I heard his name on far too many lips that I couldn’t accurately name friend or foe. Nor did I have a chance to demand anything of Kaenan, who was assiduously avoiding any overt companionship with me, for reasons I felt obvious. It was all I could do not to linger in the lecture hall after class, beg a moment of the General’s time, and spill all my fears on his desk.
I was spared a third day of nauseating uncertainty by a summons, the next morning, to attend General Dhanavari at my first liberty watch of the day. At the appointed time, I presented myself and, only slightly to my surprise, the Prefect of Discipline dismissed her scribe and other staff attendants -- our meeting was to be wholly off the record. She did me the supreme honor of acknowledging me no fool -- she told me, bluntly, that she did not believe for one instant that General Heshiko would sully his own honor or that of the House of Bells solely for the transitory pleasure of bending me over his desk. For this I was immediately, almost painfully grateful, and I assured her that I had never considered such a thing, an assertion she likewise accepted, even if she didn’t entirely credit it. No evidence existed to support such a claim, she also informed me, and that was something more of a problem.
No evidence existed to support -- or deny it. No physical evidence could be offered that would effectively prove either his innocence or my own. We had never been caught in flagrant violation of regulations but the situation was such that we might not need to be for a damaging accusation to be made and take root. General Heshiko had acted once, publicly, on my behalf by recommending me to advanced studies -- studies that brought us into close contact. And he had, to my surprise, requested my service as his student adjutant, a fact not theoretically known outside the command staff offices. And he had, on one occasion, invited me to his private chambers and dismissed me late -- after which, it could be argued, I had been rewarded quite handsomely for a penniless outcaste charity cadet.
Laid out in that fashion, I could see all too clearly the point of vulnerability and where the attack would be pressed. I asked the Prefect if a formal accusation had yet been drafted and she asserted that it had not -- yet. I knew that, should any investigation drag on too long, the originators of the plot would not hesitate to force the issue, likely by leaking damaging rumors into the court of public opinion.
I asked, hypothetically, what the outcome would be if I confessed -- not to sexual impropriety with the General, but to having attempted seduction and being rebuffed. In neutral tones, the Prefect indicated that I would be immediately expelled from the House of Bells, permanently barred from any form of commissioned or volunteer service in the Legions of the Realm, and, depending if the General wished to lay any complaint against me, I could be publicly chastised, heavily fined, and likely exiled to the Threshold. At that moment, I found the idea of being stripped naked, lashed bloody in the middle of the quad, and tossed in the belly of a ship bound for the slave market of Chiaroscuro a brilliant light in the darkness. The Prefect summoned her scribe, and that worthy being brought me paper, ink, and a brush. I wrote three copies of my confession -- one for myself, one for the Prefect, and one to be posted publicly with my articles of expulsion. I wrote Katenan a letter, begging him to forgive me for acting without him. I wrote also to General Heshiko, thanking him for his interest in my career and asking his forgiveness for the harm I nearly brought to him. The Prefect took her copies and dismissed me, instructing me to return to my schedule until the formalities could be completed. She would summon me again once the proceedings had begun.
I returned to my classes, avoiding my scalemates as best I could. I did not trust myself to maintain silence with Katenan and the Cathaks. I took my meal as alone as I could - and, even so, I caught a new whisper in certain parts of the hall. “Outcaste whore.” My blood turned to ice and if I slept at all that night it was because exhaustion, mental and emotional, demanded it.
I received the summons I expected the next morning, after unit muster and assembly. Instead of to the Prefect’s office, however, I was brought to the Commandant’s private staff meeting chamber -- and I was not alone. Present were the Commandant, the Prefect of Discipline, and, to my unending horror, General Heshiko himself. Mnemon Katenan and a handful of other students stood with them. On the opposite side of the Commandant’s long staff table stood Tepet Straton, Ragara Tiaan, and nearly a dozen others, some I recognized, some I did not. Straton’s expression was inscrutable but the look Tiaan gave was a thing of pure triumph mixed with utter loathing. I was directed to stand opposite them, which I did, my stomach a sick knot wrapped in more knots, hoping none of my violent welter of emotions showed on my face.
The Commandant opened the meeting by bidding everyone welcome, and indicated that the matter before us was one of extreme gravity given the nature of the accusations being made. At her gesture, the Prefect rose, unrolled a scroll, and in the blandest and most neutral of tones read the charges: falsely accusing a ranking officer of the Legions of gross impropriety with a subordinate, falsely accusing a fellow cadet of the same, conspiracy to subborn the Uniform Code of the Legions, gross misconduct toward the persons of fellow cadets and ranked superiors, and a fairly lengthy list of lesser, related offenses. My head went dangerously light and the only thing that held my knees firm was the refusal to show weakness before my enemies. As the reading went on, Ragara Tiaan went slowly paler, ending the color of spoiled milk; Straton simply became more opaque. The others wore a plethora of expressions ranging from shock to outrage to horror -- but none, to my eye, looked particularly innocent. I desired more than anything to look at Katenan but dared not turn my head, and he steadfastly avoided my efforts to catch his eye.
Once the Prefect finished speaking, she gestured Katenan forward. Katenan and his co-conspirators, I should say -- the other highest-ranked members of the military intelligence gathering classes. The sight of some of them caused Tiaan to go from pale to flushed with rage. With a certain spare elegance, they laid out first the broad contours of the plot against the “undesirable” cadets and then the more specific details of how their plans had worked, ending with their most elaborate scheme, the false accusation against General Heshiko. My false confession was produced as a proof that the conspiracy had penetrated the ranks of the command staff assistants, who had misused their access to confidential documents to aid their compatriots. Reams of documentation of the investigation accompanied each step, and I was astonished by the enormity of it all -- both the depth of the malice, and the extent of the effort to combat it. Once the presentation of charges and their evidence concluded, the Prefect rose and blandly offered the conspirators the opportunity to address or refute any of them.
Tiaan, perhaps wise enough to know when his leg was caught in his own trap, chose to offer as his own defense the inherent inferiority of those he had helped drive out. The phrase “Ledaal cull” was used in a frankly uncomplimentary manner with regard to my person. A few others made similar noises, though many, their culpability laid bare, considered silence the better part of valor. Straton was one of these. At the end, the Prefect rose and offered me the opportunity to address the gathering. I wrestled within myself with ten thousand unworthy impulses, I’ll tell you that right now. The stress, the anxiety, the despair of the last days rose up like bile in my throat, and it was all I could do not to spit it back at those who had caused it. At that moment, I felt the weight of General Heshiko’s golden eyes on me and I knew if I wished to be the man that shared the blood of Ledaal Catala Ayame in his regard, I could not meet my foes at that level. Instead, I turned, saluted my superiors, and said that, while justice should be done, no good could come of depriving the Legions or the Realm of so many future soldiers and officers -- not when they had shown so early such mastery of unconventional modes of warfare.
Tiaan’s anima eruption nearly shattered the windows and it took a half-dozen security officers to subdue him. He was dragged out in chains, spitting hatred of me as he went; ultimately, he was the only conspirator expelled from the House of Bells, though all were harshly disciplined. Tepet Straton and I cordially despised one another until he died during the Battle of Futile Blood, in the ill-fated action against the Bull of the North. Mnemon Katenan, having cemented his position as the trickiest bastard in our graduating class, remained my Wing and strong left hand for the duration of our time at Bells and continues to be one of the best and dearest friends I have ever been privileged to possess, as do Cathak Ariara and Cathak Zurvon. We all graduated near the top of our class.
That evening, after all the public drama of expulsion and caning and assorted other humiliating punishments had been dished out, I received a summons from General Heshiko’s aide. Again, I was ushered into his private chambers and again I was acutely nervous about it -- mostly because the letter I had written to him, and stashed in Katenan’s books in the knowledge that he would find and deliver it, lay open on the table before him. His expression was cold and closed, and his voice even colder when he demanded to know what I meant by the contents of that missive. I got out perhaps twelve words of my explanation before he exploded -- I had, to that point, never actually seen him angry at all, much less angry at me, and in the instant I deeply regretted any desire I might have had to capture his personal regard. He raged, at length, about my foolishness in taking such responsibility upon myself without speaking to him, as Katenan ultimately had, without even attempting to recruit the resources he could bring to bear on the situation. He held forth, again at length, on all the ills that could have befallen me had my false confession been used against me, had the Prefect of Discipline not been involved in unmasking the conspiracy -- I had no high Dynastic name to shield me, no family to protect me, and no matter how skilled or competent I might be, I was still a child, vulnerable in ways that an adult was not. I was astonished to realize that he had been -- he was still -- afraid. For me. In the end, he came around the table, caught me by the shoulders, and with tears in his eyes told me that my grandfather, wherever he might be, would never forgive him if he had allowed me to sacrifice my entire life merely to spare his career.
And that, if he had his way, I would not forever be without House or name.