An Ember in the Ashes

A diminutive slave-girl opens the front door of the house. The first thing I notice is her eye patch. She’ll disfigure you in the first few weeks, the slaver had said. Will the Commandant take my eye too?

Doesn’t matter. I reach for my armlet. It’s for Darin. All for Darin.
The inside of the house is as gloomy as a dungeon, the smattering of candles providing little illumination against the dark stone walls. I look around, glimpsing the simple, almost monkish furnishings of a dining room and sitting room before the slaver grabs a fistful of my hair and pulls on it so hard I think my neck will break. A knife appears in his hand, its tip caressing my eyelashes. The slave-girl winces.
“You look up one more time,” the slaver says, his hot breath foul in my face, “I’ll carve out your eyes. Understand?”
My eyes water, and at my rapid nod, he releases me.
“Stop blubbering,” he says as the slave leads us upstairs. “Commandant would rather put a scim through you than deal with tears, and I didn’t spend one hundred eighty marks just to throw your corpse to the vultures.”
The slave-girl leads us to a door at the end of a hallway, straightening her already perfectly pressed black dress before knocking softly. A voice orders us to enter.
As the slaver pushes the door open, I get a glimpse of a heavily curtained window, a desk, and a wall of hand-drawn faces. Then I remember the slaver’s knife and pin my eyes to the floor.
“It took you long enough,” a soft voice greets us.
“Forgive me, Commandant,” the slaver says. “My supplier—”
“Silence.”
The slaver swallows. His hands rasp like a snake’s coils as he rubs them together. I stand perfectly still. Is the Commandant looking at me? Examining me? I try to look beaten and obedient, the way I know Martials like Scholars to look.
A second later, she is before me, and I jump, surprised at how silently she’s come around her desk. She’s smaller than I expect—shorter than me and reed-slim. Almost delicate. If not for the mask, I might mistake her for a child. Her uniform is pressed to perfection, and her pants are tucked into mirror-bright black boots. Every button of her ebony shirt gleams with the shimmer of a serpent’s eyes.
“Look at me,” she says. I force myself to obey, instantly paralyzed as I meet her gaze. Looking into her face is like looking at the flat, smooth surface of a gravestone. There isn’t a shred of humanity in her gray eyes, nor any evidence of kindness in the planes of her masked features. A spiral of faded blue ink curls up the left side of her neck—a tattoo of some kind.
“What is your name, girl?”
“Laia.”
My head is jerked to one side, my cheek on fire before I even realize she’s struck me. Tears spring to my eyes at the sharpness of the slap, and I dig my nails into my thigh to keep from running.
“Wrong,” the Commandant informs me. “You have no name. No identity. You are a slave. That is all you are. That is all you will ever be.” She turns to the slaver to discuss payment. My face is still smarting when the slaver unhooks my collar. Before walking out, he pauses.
“May I offer you my congratulations, Commandant?”
“On what?”
“On the naming of the Aspirants. It’s all over the city. Your son—”
“Get out,” the Commandant says. She turns her back on the startled slaver, who quickly retreats, and settles her gaze on me. This thing actually spawned? What kind of demon had she whelped? I shudder, hoping I never find out.
The silence lengthens, and I remain still as a post, too afraid to even blink.
Two minutes with the Commandant and she’s already cowed me.
“Slave,” she says. “Look behind me.”
I look up, and the peculiar impression of faces I’d gotten when I first walked in resolves itself. The wall behind the Commandant is covered with wood-framed posters of men and women, old and young. There are dozens, row after row.
WANTED: Rebel Spy...Scholar Thieves...Resistance Henchman...
REWARD: 250 Marks...1,000 Marks.
“These are the faces of every Resistance fighter I’ve hunted down, every Scholar I’ve jailed and executed, most before my tenure as Commandant. Some after.”
A paper cemetery. The woman is sick. I look away.
“I will tell you the same thing I tell every slave brought into Blackcliff. The Resistance has tried to penetrate this school countless times. I have discovered it every time. If you are working with the Resistance, if you contact them, if you think of contacting them, I will know and I will destroy you. Look.”
I do as she asks, trying to ignore the faces and letting the images and words fade into a blur.
But then I see two faces that will not fade. Two faces that, however poorly rendered, I could never ignore. Shock courses through me slowly, as if my body is fighting it. As if I don’t want to believe what I see.
MIRRA AND JAHAN OF SERRA
RESISTANCE LEADERS
TOP PRIORITY
DEAD OR ALIVE
REWARD: 10,000 MARKS
Nan and Pop never told me who destroyed my family. A Mask, they said.
Does it matter which one? And here she is. This is the woman who crushed my parents under her steel-bottomed boot, who brought the Resistance to its knees by killing the greatest leaders it ever had.
How did she do it? How, when my parents were such masters of concealment that few knew what they looked like, let alone how to find them?
The traitor. Someone swore allegiance to the Commandant. Someone my parents trusted.
Did Mazen know he was sending me into the lair of my parents’ murderer? He’s a stern man, but he doesn’t seem like a willfully cruel one.