Page 13 of The Teras Trials

I’m shaken. I don’t know what to say. “Do you think I have an advantage because I’ve lived behind the wards?”

“Of course, you have an advantage.” It’s the young woman. She is leading her struggling brother and two horses up the slope.

Leo’s brows come together. He inclines his head “You all right, Si?”

A grunt from Si, the injured boy, and nothing more.

I see Leo’s gaze on Si’s sister. He mouths Will he live?

The woman considers Leo for a moment, and he shifts under her gaze. It looks like she is about to pass judgement, a sentence that will determine if Leo Shaw lives or dies. Then she turns back to her brother and nods, dissolving that strange bit of ceremony. “’Course he will. It’s barely a paper cut.”

“I’ve offered to escort Mr Cassius Jones and his brother’s body back to London,” Leo murmurs.

“In exchange for what?” the woman asks.

“A cigarette,” Leo says with a smile. I don’t correct him. The woman’s eyes slide to me, and I think for certain she sees right through me. Then she walks over and offers her hand. I take it.

“Winifred Lin,” she says with a smile. “But Winifred is a stupid name. You’ll call me Fred.”

“I will,” I say. I’d meant to ask it as a question. “Cassius Jones.”

Fred nods towards the man slumped against the horse’s flank. “That man over there is my brother Silas.”

I calmly smoke the cigarette. “I almost took you for Hunters,” I say, looking between them and the manticore’s blood in the snow. Fred retracts her hand slowly, mouth quirked in a curious smile.

“Are you trying for flattery, Mr Jones?”

“Only speaking the truth.”

She considers me for a moment. “Have you ever killed a teras before?”

“Yes,” I say. I don’t tell them I’ve only been behind the wards for five years.

She looks me over once and nods and then no one speaks. They help me load Thaddeus’ body onto my mare and we ride the hour back to London. At the gates I show them my tag, and the other three state their business. The guards won’t let them roam the city; their details are recorded and the three of them are rounded up to be escorted to the University.

Leo Shaw looks back at me before he goes. “Do keep your promise, Cassius Jones. Cannot wait to see you again.”

I say nothing as I watch him go. I’m left with Thaddeus’s broken body bleeding into the mare’s coat, and a gathering of muttering, sad guards. My mother is there, too; she gets up from a squat, wrapped tight in her shawl. Whoever found her must have told her I’d gone, and I’d like to think she came out here to wait for me, but we both know the wrong brother is returning. We make eye contact across the milling crowd. Dark circles, tear-stained cheeks, and a hungry look of fury bear down on me. I expect to be screamed at, but when I dismount, when she sees the state of Thaddeus, she just lets me walk into her arms. She doesn’t embrace me back. She’s not even looking at me.

“Hunter,” she tells me, and my stomach drops. “You have to go for Hunter.”

6

LESSON SIX

The University promises to make a stained-glass portrait of him for one of their chapel’s windows. They tell me he died a hero. I tell them a manticore is still out there, killing not one hour from London’s gates, but I get no response.

In any case, I have no time to mourn. A few days after my brother is mauled to death, I am standing in the University’s entrance hall. It is a massive, grey-stone building. The University’s crest depicts the four mantles it offers its graduates. In the top left is the flintlock gun of a Hunter, the top right the Rod of Asclepius for the Healers. The quill occupies the lower left quadrant for the Scholars, and an anvil in the lower right for the Artificers. A ribbon encircles the shield, bearing the phrase: NIHIL SINE DEO.

Nothing Without God.

Just in case we could ever forget the teras are Satan’s agents, and us God’s chosen warriors.

The facade to the entrance hall has a haunting feel to it, like lives spanning centuries have settled in its stone. Columns in the Corinthian style line its perimeter. Two wide arched windows sit either side of the massive doors, and smaller, high-set windows run the length of the walls. The entranceway looks like a temple; like entering is an act of worship for some ancient god of knowledge.

But I have been raised Christian, and I can’t help but murmur God’s name as I walk across the threshold.

I am hit by the brightness of candlelight on marble. Half of one wall is all books, though they are so high off the ground they clearly aren’t meant to be read. A small cross is on one of the walls, like a sad but necessary nod to the church, which funds much of the University’s costs. The other walls are lined with marble carved busts stripped of all their paint, in that sanitised adoption of Greco-Roman aesthetic, the eerie whiteness of them softened by candle glow. The entrance hall is circular, though two arched doorways cut through the far end wall and lead further into the University itself. It is Rome as imagined by a fascist, white and pure and perfect. Despite this, I stand bewitched, and for a moment it’s like I’m alone. All the milling bodies of the University’s prospective students vanish. It is just me and this waiting future.

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