Maid with Necromancy

Flint Steelheart stared at the empty seat for Makeus Von Trell. It wasn’t the only empty seat at Headmaster Crottish’s table, but only a fool expected Izzel to be anywhere but where educational interests took the woman.  Not that Flint was foolish enough to think the Master of Five Apes caused any of the disasters he visited, but maybe there could be a chance to convince him to prevent them from getting so bad, and leave a mess that spawned those awful classes.

“Flint. Flint. Flint. Wasn’t my speech great?” Crottish asked.

“I barely paid any attention. I’m mostly wondering how you got Von Trell to join our school. Do you think he’d be willing to join any of my forbidden hunts?” Flint asked.

The headmaster shook his head. “Your fellow pillar, Curie, wants his apes for one of her curse projects.  Titus just wants to wrestle him. No, the requirements of his stay are strict; we’re not to exceed the pre-negotiated terms.”

“Wait until Izzel hears he’s here. She mentioned they dated.” Flint quipped.

“Thankfully, pre-existing relationships don’t count as employee harassment. I only invited him as a courtesy, as I figured the rankings might interest him.”  

Why would the opening rankings interest anyone? By the third year, among the chosen nine, three will have managed to keep their top positions, and two will probably be dead in that struggle to do so. There were betting pools and dead pools, with the first year always being the bloodiest. Oorty’s Tomb lived up to its name with respect to new students.

“Come bring them over, Atkins.” Haggarty cried.

The detestable man placed wagers in both places. The statistician proved you could buy a pillar at the school, and loved the sure things that came with seeing the spell image used to help rank the chosen nine.

Magically conductive metal plates tweaked to the college’s mass analytical spell form, checking influences, titles, bonds, body types, and linking them to a student's submitted records for the final rankings.  Reading a plate was a little like reading an abstract painting, but once you've seen hundreds, you learn the practice of doing it.

The secretary brought them over; his hands didn’t shake, his walk didn’t waver, his face was calm, but his breathing had a tightness to it. You don't hunt practitioners of the forbidden arts without picking up a sense of things being off, more than the normal him wanting to strangle the headmaster.

“Where is the money at!?” Haggarty yelled to the crowd of about a dozen, who mostly returned groans.

Flint knew sticking around to sate his curiosity might cause some surprise, but with the teaching shake-up he wasn’t the only odd face looking at the nine plates.

“That’s one clean primus, lots of room for growth, and a Timberly.”

Flint tried not to snort. That family has had six primuses in the last fifty years. If they didn’t have the ranking system leaked to them, he’d be shocked. They almost always fell off halfway through their second year after the real players filled all their bonds, and post-quickening gains were clearer.

It was the headmaster grabbing up the very smudgy tertiary image that looked like it was two images superimposed over each other in a double exposure that raised another eyebrow. This wasn’t his kind of game. Too two-dimensional.  “They have all their bonds filled out, not much space for adding strength there, even if they started in the middle of the class.”

“Two broken titles. And one of them is…” Flint saw Professor Chastain glance across the room towards Hexio Curie before shaking her head. “So many powerful fingerprints, this one was probably forcibly raised up. There was slow growth and then pressured growth, causing stretch marks. Very blurry.”

“Is she a healer?” Haggarty asked giddily.

The tone of that man's voice deserved a knife to end it. “Why?” Flint asked with a warning to it.

“The bets. I don’t care if she’s been raised. A healer has never been that high in the  rankings since their inception.” The man retorted excitedly.

“We don’t gamble on children’s lives.” Flint reminded him.

“She clearly was pushed up to be here, right, Lady Chastain? It’s not her fault that she won’t be able to continue defying expectations at this level of competition. No lives at risk, even if everyone loves an outlier.”

“Crottish. Hand me that plate.”  Flint let his authority hit the man, and the headmaster stepped up.  Not all pillars of The Academy were equal. Only Izzel had been at the school longer than him. Flint Steelheart was more his than its headmaster; he was the school’s institution.

Harmony White - Revivalist -  Eraser . Seeing the profession of his old teacher sent a twinge of fear Flint felt he’d defeated long ago. The old man always told him he needed to be open to more ways of removing all problems. The plate was everything they criticized it for, except heavy depth-wise in colors and marks, with mysterious areas that were blank but shouldn't be. The hundreds he’d seen told one story that this could fit, but his gut wasn’t biting.

Outliers. Atkins, one for watching the headmaster get shamed, shuffled away slowly.

“Haggarty, you may not know what it takes to be an eraser, but I do. You want a wager, I say this girl makes it. Come up with acceptable terms where if I win, you step down as a pillar, and if you win… I’ll swear an oath to be in your debt.”  

Greed, pure greed, lit up the statistician's eyes. Money was one thing… but debts… the man was like a devil.  More ways to solve a problem, well, an eraser was always a good one. Tossing the metal plate back onto the pile, Flint knew he had a secretary to track down to see if he made the right choice.

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