The cabin smelled like salt and old leather, an amphora of night-still sea and the low, oily perfume of lamp smoke that always gathered where men – and women – sat together to conspire. Lanterns hung from iron brackets that had been forged with runes and then blackened by smoke; their glass panes were clouded, flecked with the fine, rusty dust of a thousand crossings. On the low, battered table that had once been white oak and now held the patina of voyages, someone had spread cloth stamped with a sigil that made a ring within a ring that buckled toward the center like a throat. Around it were small items folded into silent geometry – bone chips, sealed packets of black salt, a brass dial with teeth like a sun, a handful of powdered ash that looked very much like iron filings when the lamplight touched it.
Ten figures sat around the table. Each wore a mask, plain and expressionless, and the masks wore numbers painted in lacquer across the brow in a language meant to be purely functional: 1, 2, 3…10. Their clothes were black as if they had been dyed in the dark part of the ocean; some had cloaks, some only shirts, but all had the look of people who preferred their faces hidden. They didn't speak at first. The only sound in the room was the sea, a steady, enormous presence beyond the planks, and the tick of time passing like a metronome tuned to waiting.
Then the woman who bore the number one raised a hand. Her motion was small, deliberate. When they moved, the entire room shifted as if she had tugged at a master cord.
"Good," she said, and her voice did not need timber to carry it; the room filled with it anyway. "We are not tourists today."
Number two's laugh came out hard, quick; he was eager in the way of men who smell hunt and blood together. "We are ready, Captain. We will tear the school down. We will make them sing with fear."
It was a childish phrase, "make them sing," and in the bowels of the ship it had a taste of leather-whip memory. Others murmured—numbers four and seven spoke at once, overlaid like two instruments.
"We can open gates," number four said, and the word "gates" in that place carried its own gravity. "Multiple gates. Port, starboard, behind them. Open doors into low corners of the world. Let the minor regiments pass through. Let the shadows pour in and take ground."
Number seven nodded, slow, his voice a damp fold of confidence. "Yes. Each of us will deploy our squads. They will not be a single breach but a tearing. They will not know which side the teeth come from. A coordinated press, and the school is a cage with the latch broken."
Number eight's tone was another kind of curiosity. "And the queen?" she asked, eyebrows lifting under her mask. "Do we call for her? Bring in the newly waxed crown?"
Number ten laughed at the question, though his laugh was a brittle thing. "We would be lucky if the queen bothered to glance. She has bigger seas than a school. Why would she cross from a remote throne to soil thick with adolescent mana?"
Number nine, always quick to adore any dangerous idea, tilted his head. "If the queen did step in, she would not merely take; she would remake. Imagine a queen arriving, indifferent, sweeping the yard with one look, and children folding like paper. We cannot promise that. We should wish for it."
Their eagerness was the first thing that set the hair on the back of one's neck straight. The second was how civilized the talk sounded: the machinery of plot whirring in language that pretended to be careful, almost managerial. They were violent, but they were not ragged. This was not a mob. It was a committee of people who had practiced being terrible and had massaged their cruelty into craft.
Number one put a finger to the ring on her lip, thoughtful. She had the smallest of gestures for silencing a room, and it worked. "Listen," she said, slower now, the letter sounds like careful contraband. "We are not children. We are not here for theater. We are not the mob on the quay with torches. The academy is not a market stall. If we crash a gate and pour demons in, yes, chaos. But chaos is a blunt instrument. We are not blunt. We are precise."
She spread a hand palm-down above the cloth where the throat-sigil lay. "The students are the means. The sample. The population. Their harm is a tool. Don't let your greed turn it into a slaughter for slaughter's sake. We have research aims. We have a queen who wants specimens – clean, not burned. We will not simply throw them into the ocean and see what drifts up."
She said the word "specimens" like a surgeon reading inventory. The word landed in the chest of each masked face with a small, unmistakable click. Planters of gardens speak of "seed," lab technicians speak of "samples." In a room of pirates, it would have sounded obscene. Here it simply felt professional.
Number two pounced on the moral edge in the way that some people pounce on an argument just to feel heat. "Specimens, sir? They are children."
"Yes," said number one, and her voice was mild. If she had been wind, it would have been a cold front. "Some of them are children. Some of them are a generation of raw mana. That is precisely why we take them. We capture raw talent, not broken husks. The queen's needs are surgical. She wants to gauge which lineages bend to what break. She wants to graft demon-lore on top of nascent mana and see which specimens survive. If we burn them, the queen gets nothing and the ocean has to pay for our arrogance."
The table nodded, whether from agreement or the pull of her logic didn't matter. People like rationales; people like the idea that what they do is in service to something larger than appetite. She smelled that need and used it like a compass.
Number four leaned forward. "The gates," he said, fingers flexing as though they shaped the air itself. "I have the keys. Not the old keys; I have the new kind, the strike-keys—burned iron with lunar signs. They open a sliver, not a flood. They will let sprites and hounds through; they will not let a tide. They will accept a command. We push a unit in: one, two, three. Each unit takes a wing. We create noise here, draw their trained staff, then we snag the children they leave unguarded."
Unnerving, the way he structured the thought as if it were logistics. Structured, too, the way he assumed the academy would behave: trained staff, clear duties, slots that could be exploited. They had studied their enemy as if such study were a lab test.
Number seven's grin was a small, dangerous moon. "And while the staff are bled of attention," he said, "our men take the better specimens. We need not take many; a handful that match our charts is enough. Too many would trouble the queen. Take the strongest, the ones with the touch in the bone. Fold them into the crates we have stockpiled, and the queen can… perform her work. The rest?" He shrugged. "We make noise. We break things. We leave a lesson."
Number eight's brow creased at that. "You would leave survivors? People who remember? How can we be certain there won't be reprisals?"
Number one's hands stilled on the cloth. She looked at number eight for a long time, like a winter observing a bird. "Reprisals," she said at length, and she did not sound impatient. "In this war of hearts and blood, reprisal is inevitable. We will minimize it. We will choose the time and the place to maximize our gain and minimize our exposure. A scorched field invites a retaking. We will not make a field. We will make mirrors. We will take what is necessary, and leave them enough to wonder but not enough to mount a meaningful counter. And if the queen smiles at our success, reprisals become their problem, not ours."
Somewhere beneath the words lived another truth: the queen's interest was security. A queen indifferent to the trivialities of a school used those school-born samples the way a sculptor uses clay—malleable, ignorant of their fate. But the queen also had limits. She did not descend at a schoolyard scale unless there was reason to bring a specter to bear. She preferred that men like number one clear the lesser messes so that she could move in for the profitable ones alone.
Number three, who hadn't spoken until now, tapped the brass dial with two fingers and made it sing against the table. "We need to be surgical," she said, voice low. "We need a line team that does not engage. The line team gets in, places the nets—literally, netting woven with black-thread sigils. Nets catch mana like baskets catch fruit. We throw the nets on less-entrenched wards and the children inside them bob like caught fish. That is where we act. One crack at a ward, and a net. Then a tram that carries them down to crates. The rest is masquerade and fast-doors."
Number nine burst with a kind of adolescent joy at the idea. "Crates," he repeated. "Imagine it. Crates that hold more than flesh. Labels. A ledger. 'Specimen A: Amber lineage. Reaction to Drasiruth compound: positive.' We will know them by numbers. We will call them what we take."
The ledger made the whole room smile like a schoolchild who had found his tribe. People like lists; people like the idea that what they do can be catalogued, categorized, shelved.
Number five, the quietest of them, who had been listening with her head tilted like someone hearing an impossible song, finally spoke in a tone that was more consideration than fear. "What of the staff? We will not be able to take all attention. They will fight. There are guardians. There are instructors with ruinous hands."
Number one's look was a focused light. She drew a breath and let it carry something like a carefully balanced cruelty. "We will not be stupid. We will stage false attacks. We will simulate a stack of threats—a fire to the south, a phantom breach to the east. We will make them run like dogs after scent, and while they are running we will slip through the gaps they do not have time to mend. We will take the specimens before their minds are arranged by panic."
She sat back, and the shadow of the lantern made her mask deeper black. For a long time she appeared to be thinking not of the moment but of the consequences: the human ledger, the queen's appetite, the fate of those they would take. Her mind was a cold machinery, oil and measure, and in it she had placed a small, unmovable stone called "purpose."
"What of those we cannot take?" number two asked, the callus of his ambition brushing his tongue. "Do we burn them? Do we leave lessons? Make them fear us?"
Number one's mouth tightened. "We will leave them fear in a reasoned amount. We will not make a spectacle. The lesson is deterrence, not genocide. We will raze what is needed to assure silence—but we will keep the boundaries. We wish to bend the world, not destroy it."
There was then a pause that smelled like ocean and old pages. The ship rocked, a small, indifferent movement that turned the candle flames into slow-going tongues. Somebody else on board, in another shadowed room, might have thought the grammar of the plan cruel and that was worldly enough; these people felt cruelty's grammar like familiar bone.
Number six, who had been polishing a silvered blade in a motion so steady it looked meditative, interrupted: "And the escape?"
Numbers nine and four traded a glance. Number four had already rolled the idea around in his mouth like one chews a seed. "We will not take the main route. We will climb the back channels. The docks will watch for ships that do not move like men-of-war. They will watch the outward tide. They will not watch the black slips we leave behind. We will make fireworks of shadow and sprint like rats at dawn."
The word "dock" in this context was as practical as wielding a commodity. They had people in ports and a tender crew who could move a boat like a shadow. The plan smacked now of logistics, not just desire. That made sense to them. They were, after all, a network of people who had learned to be precise.
Number eight, who had sketched arcs of a map in ash on her palm, lifted her head a fraction. "The queen," she said again, voice cautious, "is distant. But she will notice. If she notices and is pleased, she will take for herself the specimens we bring. That is, perhaps, not what some of us want."
Number one's eyes, behind the lacquer of the mask, slid to the map-lighter and then to the ring on her finger. The tide of her thinking had been occupied by logistics, but now she allowed a sliver of feeling across a small part of the machinery she called strategic.
"I do not work to prevent greed," she said. "I work to make the queen want us. We will bring things she wishes and leave her with a choice: either she smiles at our work and we are her instruments; or she frowns and she smothers what we have done. If she smiles, our names will not be carved into stones; they will be given gold. If she frowns, the sea will pay for our arrogance. We choose her smile."
That sentence folded the room in half. There is a peculiar kind of terror in that: choosing to seek favor with something that can look down and determine whether you live. It is a gamble between safety and consent, and it made the pace of the ship feel thinner somehow, like a rope that might snap under the weight of their ambition.
They worked then in the mechanics of it. Someone produced small crates already carved and bound with a netting of fine obsidian thread—thread that would stifle a nascent spell like a hand over a mouth. Someone else thumped the nails into place with a hammer that made a soft metallic heartbeat. The map was unrolled and they marked the academy's layout, known guard rotations, the vector of dawn's light in the school's eastern courtyard. They noted the towers where instructors liked to linger, the gardens where children practiced early-morning flame and flight, the infirmary with its thin walls and better-than-average staff.
They did not speak loudly. They assigned roles with a pragmatic economy that left no ego in the room. Number four took the gate-keys and spoke of calling in the low-rank things of the under-seas: quick creatures that would eat cheer and give fear. He spoke of timing the summons to the quarter-hour when the morning lessons shifted. He placed a finger on the map like a pin. They would strike then.
They rehearsed contingencies with the same method one uses to stitch a sail: neat, folding each danger until it fit the margin of the plan. Every "what if" was a seam; every seam was bound by the thin, practical cruelty of people who think about outcomes more than faces.
When the hour wrenched itself toward sinuous morning, they folded the map and hid the ledger. The crates were slotted away in the ship's hold under a false panelling. Men strapped nets onto their hips and fastened belts with slots for flasks that steamed a suspicious, dark-smelling brew. Number one walked the gangplank like a captain of something more than a ship: she was a captain of the promise of an iron fate.
In the hold, beneath the deck, the sigils on the cloth glinted one final time. The ring within the ring seemed to breathe. They had choreographed the cruelty like a performance, and now they were about to take the stage.
No one in that small, water-swept room admitted the brutal truth that gave their plan its name: the academy's children were not mere trophies. They were raw material—hot, wet, human mana—and that change in categorization made all the difference. It turned an attack into research. It made kidnapping feel like procurement; it transmuted massacre into supply chain. No one in masks said this aloud. But their ledger knew.
They filed out before dawn swallowed the husk of night. The ship cut its wake like a dark argument across the silvered morning sea, and in the lower bow, the crate-laden stomach of the vessel hummed with the frightened, patient sleep of people who believe their morality is negotiable.
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Heat: Thanks for reading.