Devourer Of Destiny - Chapter 150
A wave of excited chatter spread through the audience after that moment of silent shock. The contest had gone entirely beyond expectations. This was supposed to have a victory lap for the established order, a showcase of dominance that showed that the system as it was worked.
Ebon Dirge had no illusions of some revolution stemming from this incident. It was just a solitary, isolated event, and he had no interest in stoking the fires so long as he could ride it to his own advancement in the Celestial Ascendance Academy.
Even as Dirge was considering how best to transmit this interest, something truly unexpected occurred to disrupt that line of thought: with a loud thump, Master Harford, premier forgesmith of the Fifth Tier of the Academy, fell to his knees, dropping the half of a sword that he still held with a clatter.
“Sable,” he said hoarsely, almost whisper quiet. “Could you… could you–” the forgesmith gulped heavily, having great difficulty finding the words he wanted to say. “Could you teach me? Become… my teacher, I mean.”
The gray-bearded man had a small smile at the scene, while plump Clodiana looked about ready to faint. The black-robed man’s expression was disinterested, but the other judges also looked slightly amused at the development.
Dirge shook his head. “No. I don’t think so,” he replied flatly.
Clodiana appeared to have finally remembered how to breathe, while the other expressions flattened, except that of the gray-bearded man. The entire exchange was quiet enough that only a handful in the audience — those not engrossed in their own exchanges with one another — heard it, yet they all seemed surprised.
Dirge had gone off the script, of course. He was supposed to reach out and lift the man up and accept his offer graciously. In a very near-term kind of thinking it might have been a wise decision, even. But in his calculus, accepting Master Harford as a student was chaining an anchor around his ankle.
The forgesmith was a full century into his current style and habits. Affecting a total transformation of that took more than willingness and a book of methods; it’d take painstakingly hard work and time. Work and time that Dirge was not interested in investing, given the benefits. Amelia’s dampening of his soul and spiritual sense abilities with a specific warning against using the harsher methods had ruled out the one way to quickly affect the right changes in Harford: a rewrite of his psyche.
Dirge would have needed to do something of that level anyway because this man’s mentality was all wrong. The fellow had stayed in the Fifth Tier for heavens knows how long because he was dedicated to his craft and not to actually teaching his students. He was another link in the chain of failure, one without the crucial thing needed right now: merit points.
Harford only gave a shuddering sigh as a response to Dirge’s rejection. The man himself knew his shortcomings, the invisible chains that held him back, so there was no point in making the argument.
“That doesn’t mean you won’t ever learn it, Matthew,” Dirge said, opting to use the man’s first name. “The methods will be available in the Academy sooner or later, thanks to young Eloise. You will have the time to recenter yourself before then and decide whether it’s the right choice.”
The dejected forgesmith nodded thoughtfully, hope replacing despair in his eyes. “Thank you,” he said. Master Matthew then stood and inclined his head to the gray-bearded man before returning to his station and beginning to clean up.
“Mistress Sable,” the gray-bearded man said warmly. “You have certainly livened up this dull corner of the school. If you’ll join me once this wraps up?”
Dirge nodded. “Certainly, sir.” This was the inroad he was looking for in the school’s hierarchy, so he would definitely accept the invitation.
“Ladies and gentleman, fellow experts of the Celestial Ascendance Academy,” the gray-bearded man said in that louder voice that carried through the auditorium, cutting through the chatter of the crowd. “I hope you all have enjoyed our presentation today and that maybe some new horizons may have opened up for many of you. I would like to thank our esteemed panel as well as the pair of teachers who showed us both the orthodox and the innovative today.”
“I am sure many of you have question for Mistress Sable, but I would ask that you hold off for a short while as in light of this contest it is clear she will need a new office, too,” the gray-bearded man continued, the last bit with a twinkle in his eye and a chuckle that elicited a sympathetic ripple of laughter in the audience. “We are now adjourned.”
The audience members started to rise and leave in their clusters and groups, although some remained to have their conversations. From the judge’s bench, Clodiana nodded curtly to the gray-bearded man, ignoring the presence of everybody else in the room entirely, and stomped out of the auditorium without a word.
The gray-bearded man walked up to Dirge smiling. “Lucius Fabian,” he introduced himself. “Let’s use the stage exit. Undoubtedly these hidebound folks wouldn’t have let you enter using it before, but they can’t exactly tell me I can’t.”
Dirge nodded and followed the man as they left the stage and exited the building, walking in the direction opposite of where the rest of the crowd was dispersing. “Very handy,” Lucius noted, “the part where you require so much as a bit of the equipment so you have no cleanup to worry about, unlike that old fellow. Why did you reject his offer anyway?”
“Too old and hidebound, as you said,” Dirge replied. “I’d spend more time and effort breaking habits and beliefs than I would in imparting anything, and just as likely create a wreck that could make nothing from any style.”
Lucius chuckled, “Yes, that’s true, plus you’d be lifting a heavy anvil at a time you want to be spry and upwardly mobile, wouldn’t you?”
Dirge shrugged but was inwardly wary. This strange gentleman appeared to be an ally, but his perceptiveness could come to be a detriment if caution wasn’t exercised. “I would say something like I am here to enrich the new generation and not the old one, but I fear I might offend the present company with such flippant speech.”
“Oh, I’m far older than the relics that are already annoying enough,” Lucius admitted, “it’s just that I have a memory of better times, too, while this is all they’ve known. It wasn’t always like this.”
“This?” Dirge asked with an arched eyebrow, volunteering nothing.
Lucius sighed. “Needing dramatic gestures to escape the pit of connections and back-patting that’s infesting the bottom tier. The rot was already well set in when I joined the Academy, but it hadn’t gotten that bad until the past two centuries or so.”
So this guy did notice the thrust of Dirge’s intentions, at least so long as escaping the bounds of the Remedial Institute. “So the greatest school in the entire world is falling apart, just like that?”
“I’m afraid so,” Lucius said in agreement. “It was an insidious bit of change. We had the greatest artisans and spellweavers in the world, and they decided to leave the Academy better than they found it. Year after year, their contributions came in, with all the functions attached to the student and teacher tokens. Air traffic control, routing through the school, transportation, we could do all of it without needing to speak to another sentient being. Just show up for your studies and you could ignore everything else.”
Dirge laughed. “All the creature comforts and no thought that it would turn the denizens into housepets?”
“It’s a difficult business, running a school of this scale,” Lucius admitted. “By the time I became one of the seven provosts, the officials just beneath the true executives of the school, it was far too late to try and move things back. My old teacher left this world with a pile of regrets and a list of grievances for noticing it all too late. It was all too easy and insidious: the growing population of our world meant a larger list of applicants to deal with, and we’re all cultivators, who has time to deal with every detail?”
“And so more and more functions were taken out of the hands of individuals,” Dirge picked up on the provost’s train of thought. “All that time to focus on the students, you told yourselves as each change crept in. Completely neglecting that when you create a pile of automation to handle people, the true power in charge goes to the ones who maintain and run that.”
Lucius nodded. “And look, such a beautiful landscape we get to walk through here,” he gestured to the planters along the lane, filled with well-manicured bushes and healthy trees. “One could completely forget that the core of the school is a web of exclusion, as long as you have one of the necessary keys to get in.”
“Connections or cash,” Dirge chimed in. “Pure benefits. When you reduce everything to that level, things that should be personal become line items on a budget, one where you always try to stay in the positive. Creating a forgotten mountain of students and teachers who would bring the metrics in the negative. So, are we going to continue this woeful rattling off of the list of grievances, or was there something you had in mind, Lucius?”
Lucius chuckled ruefully. “You’ve got me there. Once upon a time, I used to pursue cases like yours, the outsiders. Then I stopped; too much failed hope, promise unfulfilled. But you’ve surprised me. You succeeded spectacularly against the mass that benefits from the machine.”
“I’m sure that’s all very inspiring,” Dirge replied rather drolly, “but that isn’t even for a little Remedial Institute neophyte like me to attract a big scary provost of the Celestial Ascendance Academy like you.”
“It’s complicated, but I guess I’ll make a bet on you,” Lucius said, holding out an arm to halt. “How much do you know about the foundation of the school?”
Dirge frowned inwardly; this was dangerous territory, threading the needle on what he did know and what he should know. “I know that its tradition spans back through the course of known history.”
“Yes, and far beyond that, but we don’t put that in the public stuff,” Lucius agreed. “The Celestial Ascendance Academy was founded by an ancestor, one who came from outside of this world. That ancestor is still alive, as far as we know.”
Dirge nodded and tried to look thoughtful in doing it. “Okay.”
“I say as far as we know because about a thousand years ago, he went missing. The administrators of the time thought little of it because it was fairly common for him to go into rest or to wander for centuries at a time. Now it has been long enough, and enough has been changing, that I think it is alarming. This is where you come in.”
Dirge frowned. “The school has an ancestor who is, in all likelihood, an immortal and who has gone missing for a millennium now, and somehow I’m involved now?”
Lucius sighed. “I was able to track down his last known whereabouts, and whether he is still alive or not, his whereabouts are still here in the Academy. The problem is that it involves the Merit Vault, and access to a specific secret realm, one only open to teachers.”
“That you can’t enter for some reason?” Dirge rose an eyebrow.
Lucius shrugged. “It requires a ludicrous amount of merit to qualify to enter, although you don’t have to spend it. So much so that anybody who acquires that much is usually coopted into administration and thus no longer qualifies.”
“And you can’t waive this requirement just to check?”
Lucius shook his head. “Part of all that wonderful automation. One might suspect that a cage was specifically built around our founder if one were the suspicious type. And the access to that realm is one the founder himself had set down, so revoking it is even harder even if I could get enough administrators to care.”
Dirge nodded. “So you need to get in the old fashioned way.”
“Exactly,” Lucius agreed. “I sense that you would gleefully stomp on all of our toes as long as you get to teach the way you want to. I am going to encourage that. I can’t just outright give you the points, but I can clear some obstructions and create some opportunities.”
“Clear some obstructions? Like our dear friend Clodiana?”
Lucius laughed. “Clodiana and Harford have a bit of history and she was repaying a favor. She also had a very… strong opinion about people and their proper places, coming from a Western clan of some power. She’s only on the Third Tier, so she isn’t highly influential, but her backer is one of my colleagues, so I have to step around her politely as much as possible. She won’t let go of this, but I can ensure she can’t so much more than make some noise.”
Dirge shrugged. “Adversity often becomes opportunity. Speaking of which, you said you’d create some opportunities.”
Lucius nodded. “Yes, and I have one already, but it requires a bit more effort on your part to qualify. How fast do you think you can get that first student of yours into Foundation Building?”
“I’d rather not rush too quickly,” Dirge admitted, taking on the pose of the properly concerned mentor, “but his primary bottlenecks were psychological, so fairly fast. Why?”
“Manage that, and I’ll get you into the Fourth Tier where you can meet an… interesting fellow. The higher tiers don’t have a Remedial Institute, but if they did, this one would need it around now.”
“So all I need to do is get Theo smoothly into Foundation Building, and I can make the Fourth Tier?” Dirge asked.
“Yes. Rehabilitating two impossible cases, and especially one like Eloise, allows me to bend some barriers for you.”
Dirge nodded. “Okay. So is there a reason I can’t see this interesting fellow now, besides propriety?”
“Not really, although he might balk if he was directed to visit you at the Remedial Institute down here,” Lucius supplied with a small frown.
“Well then,” Dirge replied with a beaming smile, “that a problem you’re eminently qualified to fix, isn’t it?”