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Mollandra
Year Five
Mollandra could sense the intruder above her on the roof of the Academy, just as, long ago, she had started to be able to sense Night-Father when he hunted. There was a familiarity to the contact, a certainty that they felt her presence just as she felt theirs.
Day-Father had sent Milk-Eye up the chimney after Mollandra when she made her escape bid. Had he sent her again? Would he send all of her onetime family to drag her back to him? What madness must it take to reach into the Kindnesses’ home and claim what was theirs?
“We could just barricade the doors and let the Kindnesses take care of it.” Tmanga was terrifyingly practical at times.
Mollandra shook her head. “Not one of them saw Father even when he was right out in the open.”
“If he starts kicking the dormitory door in, they probably will.” Tmanga got to her feet, raising her voice to address the other acolytes. “Block that door, ladies, or we’re all going to die, Mollandra’s daddy’s about to arrive.”
“Sounds like a Mollandra-shaped problem to me.” Freeda glanced up from her bed without enthusiasm.
“Why would he kill the rest of us?” Lurgan at least seemed worried.
“You saw what he looked like.” Sharp drew her knife. “He’ll slice your belly just to hear the splat of your guts on the floor. Same as I would. Same as I will right now if you don’t get moving.”
The girls hurried to block the door, even Freeda. Whether they were more scared of Sharp or of the visitors wasn’t clear. They moved beds, breaking splinters from the bed planks to use as wedges.
The intruder didn’t feel like Father, but Mollandra let the idea stand. They had all seen him and understood the threat, or at least felt it crawl over their skin.
As the acolytes worked, Mollandra became aware of more intruders, many more. None of them felt like Father had, these were smaller vortices in the void, carrying some of his terror but less paralysing, at least singularly. Still, if there had been somewhere to run to, Mollandra would have run.
With the beds bracing the door, the acolytes readied their weapons. All of them had daggers of one design or another, save for Loom, who favoured a weighted club ever since taking the elixir. She’d surprised everyone by recovering from the burns, but the damage to her hands meant she wouldn’t last long now. Not that any of them looked like lasting long.
The handle moved silently. Normally it squeaked and the acolytes liked it that way. Whoever was outside had used strange magics to swallow the sound—that or simply injected oil into the mechanism.
Mollandra watched, entranced, as the handle moved up and down. The first of them to arrive had been joined by three more. Five new ones moved up the corridor to join those already there: she could feel their presence like fingertips pressed to the surface of her brain. More came hurrying in bursts of movement, keeping close to the walls, like cats or rats.
These were her brothers and sisters in the life she had escaped. The children she had abandoned to their fate. Little had scared her since she joined the Academy. She had thought that part of her had been broken, the capacity for terror burned out of her at unknown cost. But she found herself trembling now, frightened to see what Mother and Father had wrought of the children she had left behind. Frightened of the creatures they had twisted her siblings into. And terrified not so much of their rage or of their hatred, but of the hurt and accusation she might find in their eyes.
The handle turned again, accompanied by a muffled thud. Twice more, slightly less muffled each time.
“We could scream,” Sharp suggested, seeming more amused than scared.
Nobody bothered replying. Night screams were part of the Academy, part of the system by which one hundred became three. No one would come running.
“An instructor will come to look for us in the morning.” Tmanga sat back on her bed, anticipating the wait.
Boom!
The door shook under the coordinated impact of multiple bodies. The acolytes threw themselves against the stacked bedframes, bracing the timbers.
BOOM!
Another blow, this one jolting through the bed that Mollandra had set her shoulder to. Sharp came to stand beside Mollandra, not helping, as if she’d rather those outside were permitted to come in and debate the matter with her. Tmanga joined them, also not helping to support the defences.
“The wedges will hold. You can’t get enough bodies against that door to bludgeon it open. If they’d brought axes, that’d be a different matter.”
Mollandra continued to lean against the stacked beds. “They’ll have brought something.”
Even as she said it, she sensed the invaders stepping back from the door, organizing themselves in some manner. The swirling darkness that she could somehow see in place of each of them, even through wood and stone, seemed to align, the vortex of each matching those around it.
“It’s happening now…” In Mollandra’s mind it was similar to the thing that Undu had taught them only months before in the stench of the catacombs. Though neither she, Sharp, nor Tmanga had any great skill when it came to necromancy, they could within their trio combine their strengths in a manner that was greater than mere addition.
