Death’s Handmaiden
Niall Teasdale
Copyright 2020 Niall Teasdale
Amazon Kindle Edition
Contents
Part One: The Girl Who Would Not Duel
Part Two: Student Body Politics
Part Three: Addictions
Part Four: Quintessential Terror
Part Five: Death’s Handmaiden
Epilogue
Part One: The Girl Who Would Not Duel
Shinden Alliance School of Sorcery, Shinden, Clan Worlds Alliance, 235/1/10.
The corridors of the first-year teaching building were thick with new students attempting to find their homerooms. The intake this year came to one thousand five hundred and sixty-two students which made for a considerable amount of chaos. Nava navigated the throng with a stoic expression on her face, maintaining a steady pace in the direction her ketcom had told her would get her to room two-twelve. Given that she had only received her first ketcom six months ago, she found it difficult to understand how she could use hers while everyone else seemed to be unable to. Ask the device for directions and you got them.
Maybe it was just that everywhere in the building looked the same. It was a square building with a central quadrangle open to the sky. Each of the four floors had fifteen classrooms on it along with a few additional rooms for the staff and utilities. Each classroom contained a lectern for the teacher and thirty identical desks in rows of six. They all had doors off identical white corridors which had few signs to indicate where you were. You needed a ketcom to navigate the place, but it seemed that the students had forgotten what seventeen years of life experience had taught them. About seventeen years by the calendar Nava was used to; the Alliance standard was a four-hundred-and-nineteen-day year; the school took students of fifteen standard years and over. Nava had essentially regressed two years of age on coming to the Clan Worlds. Days on Shinden were twenty-three hours long; thankfully, no one seemed to be taking that into account in age calculations.
Nava’s ketcom vibrated in her hand and she cut across traffic to the door she had just arrived near. Sure enough, a small sign above the door read 212. It was difficult to spot, but it was there. If everyone else was checking every door that way, morning lessons would be starting late. The door itself was open and she walked through into the classroom which, as per spec, had thirty desks and a teaching lectern. One of the walls was glass and the room was on the outside wall, so the view showed more of the white concrete buildings which made up the campus. Whoever had designed the Shinden Alliance School of Sorcery – SAS2 to its friends – had been into white concrete. In a few places, another designer had come along and added highlights in grey or black or blue, but the predominant colour was stark white, at least among the academic buildings.
Quite a few desks were already taken, either with someone sitting at them or indicated by the presence of a school-prescribed student case resting on the seat. Nava began to entertain hopes of a prompt start as she headed for the window seat on the fourth row. She would be sitting behind a copper-haired girl with large green eyes and a spectacular bust who looked nervous. It was the first day of a new year in a new school; Nava imagined that people were generally nervous about that kind of thing, even if she was not. Very little unnerved Nava.
Taking her seat, Nava hooked her case onto the hook at the side of the desk which was designed for that purpose. Then she pulled her ketcom out of its travel interface and slotted the slim plastic card into the slot on her desk which was also designed for that purpose. Without delay, the desk’s display systems lit up, requesting a password. Nava entered the string of sixteen random characters from memory using the desk’s virtual keyboard. Most people did not use passwords for secondary authentication, preferring the easy utility of facial or fingerprint recognition; Nava did not consider those methods secure enough. Now the display presented an interface to her ketcom, including an icon for accessing her personal files and another for approved classroom apps. There was also a clock, indicating that she had five minutes to wait before the teacher should arrive at eight thirty to begin homeroom. She was on time to within a few seconds of her expectations. Good.
She was one of only four students sitting alone at their desks. Her, the green-eyed girl in front of her, a dark, sullen-looking boy in the back corner away from the window, and another boy who, for reasons unknown, was wearing glasses and occupying one of the central seats. No one wore glasses these days since correcting eyesight was a simple procedure. An affectation of some sort then. He did look like the studious type even though he was, by the standards of the day, neither unattractive nor unfit. Perhaps the studious appearance was just the result of the glasses.
Everyone else was occupied with learning the identities of their classmates. They were standing around in groups, generally around a desk where someone who was slightly more attractive was sitting. The chatter was continuous and easily ignored though Nava picked snippets out of the conversations prior to rejecting them as meaningless. Sitting in a classroom with twenty-nine other people her age was going to be wearing. She was already looking forward to searching out her new accommodation after school; she had yet to see her apartment, having arrived at the school that morning.
Nava returned her attention to the desk in front of her when a pair of green eyes glanced her way. The girl had a round sort of face with ginger eyebrows matching her hair, a small pert nose, full lips stained red, and large eyes with seemingly oversized, vibrantly green irises. Her skin was tan coloured which was not atypical of the population of the Clan Worlds. Nava estimated she was about five centimetres shorter than Nava’s one hundred and
