Vicious Magick (9 page)

“I know a few philosophers who I’m sure would
be happy to
speculate
about the meaning of the characters
for you.”

“Uh, I think we’ll pass on that.”

The Universitorium

The purpose of the Universitorium is to house
the most dangerous criminals on the continent of Upper Kleighton:
middle- to upper-class youth. When these scheming, angsty future
felons reach the age of seventeen, they are promptly shipped off to
be institutionalized before they can become a burden on their
families and communities.

At the Universitorium, they are subjected to
the harshest punishments imaginable: forced drinking binges,
tedious lectures, and food of a quality that has been rejected as
feed for Agrarian hogs. These youths are paired off in tiny cells
and made to share communal toilets and showers. While prisoners
have the luxury of free time, these ‘scholasts,’ as they’re called,
are made to fill parchment with ink, made to purchase the tomes of
their professors, and forced to parade around the Universitorium
grounds attending various useless functions.

After four years of this torture, these
future thieves and pederasts are dispersed across the countryside
and conscripted into bureaucratic labor, running enterprises and
government offices for the benefit of the peasant elite.

Professor Sogbottom pulls a chunk of cheese
from the bottom of his knapsack and hands it to Madra. She breaks a
piece off and chews it slowly as the wagon grinds its way across
the endless plains.

The wagon encounters an odd cluster of
bushes, and an arrow twangs itself into the wooden seat between
them. Sogbottom looks at it and has a pang of realization.

“Brigands!”

The next few seconds are a blur as the old
horse freaks out and snaps itself loose, the sudden change in
velocity sends Madra flying from her seat at the front of the wagon
and face-first into the ground, and Sogbottom lifts up his seat to
grab a weapon.

As she loses consciousness, Madra is dimly
aware of the whistling of volleys of arrows and the frantic
footstomps and screams of their assailants.

Zanther and Novanostrum are in the third
largest library in all of Upper Kleighton. A group of half a dozen
librarians take turns examining the map.

“Nope,” one said, “we don’t have anything
like that.”

“Nothing? No texts about Nasonic Monks and
their written language?” Novanostrum asks.

“Oh, sure, we’ve got lots of books like
that,” another one of them says, “but they were all written by
philosophers.”

Zanther claps Novanostrum on the shoulder.
“There’s nothing for it; we’ve got to go to the source of the
scribbles.”

“The Nasonic Temple,” one of the scholars
says, “is outside the village of Zweissergrund.”

Zweissergrund

The village of Zweissergrund was founded
hundreds of years ago by Darrinian spies. Before heading to
Claustria to steal military secrets and before infiltrating the
Universitorium to snoop around for research projects with military
implications, they would provision themselves in Zweissergrund.
Originally, there were only a few sturdy houses occupied for a few
months every year. Over time, a few Darrinian families settled
there to protect the storehouses, and after five or six
generations, the place evolved into a small village catering to ski
tourists and elites from all over the region. The spies, rather
than going through all the bother of traveling to their various
target cities, started extracting secrets from their wealthy
visitors using blackmail, scandalous women, and a few darker
methods we won’t go into here.

Madra awakens to find a cloth wrapped around
her forehead and the horse reattached to the wagon. Sogbottom looks
a little worse for the wear, but aside from a few scratches and
bruises he doesn’t appear to be severely injured.

“What the High Hell happened?” she asks.

“It was the damnedest thing,” he says,
“they’d surrounded us, and I thought for sure we were going to be
murdered, but before they could get close, the all ran away.
Something must’ve filled them with a holy terror, because they
never even looked back.”

Madra can’t see directly behind the
rapidly-progressing wagon. Far behind them, just before the horizon
line, one can almost make out a bunch of bloody bundles barely
visible within the tall grasses. Looking much more closely at these
bloody bundles, they’re people grasping their knees, eyes frozen
wide in terror, throats slit ear-to-ear.