Simon didn't slow anyone down as they raced across the plaza. He stayed exactly a step behind the boy he'd been assigned to shadow as they went up the steps and into the giant ziggurat. He could have outrun the acolyte easily, but that wasn't the right move just now. He didn't seem like a bad kid comparatively, but he could make Simon's life for the foreseeable future pretty hard if Simon got him in trouble or showed him up.

Instead, the two of them stayed together in the middle of the pack, and Simon received only a heel of bread for his trouble. That seemed to be pretty standard fare for shadows. At dinner, they were fed the scraps their acolyte felt like giving them, but for breakfast, the minder apparently decided they didn't actually want half of their students to starve.

Today, though, it wasn't the food that he was interested in, not when he was finally in something that looked like a classroom. He'd jumped through so many hoops to get here, and now he couldn't take his eyes off the cavernous room.

When his acolyte saw Simon's reaction, he just laughed between bites of breakfast and said, "Yeah, well, enjoy it. I've been here for months, and eventually, you get tired of it."

Simon only dimly remembered his college days at this point, but he was fairly sure he hadn't cared for the experience. The man he'd become, though, would never get tired of learning, and so this new place, sinister though it was, felt almost as awe-inspiring as the Oracle's temple.

The room that the hundreds of boys and girls gathered in was a vast dome that had been carved like an amphitheater, with great care paid to the acoustics. The slope was steep, like a lecture hall, and each seat was like a stone desk with seating for perhaps a hundred, which wasn't nearly enough for everyone here.

I probably won't need a seat, though, Simon thought as he appreciated that place.

There were certainly many details worth studying. The way it was carved made it unlikely it had been made with physical tools, but then, Simon wouldn't have expected anything less in the very heart of the Magi's symbol of power, and he idly wondered how many centuries of human life essence it had taken to power the words of earth that had shaped this place.

There was a large chalkboard at the front and a few large binding circles carved into the floor near the instructor's lectern. Those were impressive, but aside from those details and a pillar that had been carved into a giant statue of the god-king holding up the ceiling, there were no other decorations in the room.

He was even more pleased when an actual Magi showed up to teach them, and the acolytes opened up actual textbooks. About fucking time, he thought to himself as he stood there. He was very pleased to be in a place where actual learning was finally happening. This is what he'd hoped for from day one, and it had only taken a season to get here.

Innumerable days of boredom and dozens of minor bouts of suffering had been worth it, he finally decided after the class had been in session for a few minutes, even if he was a little let down by the content of the course. After months of slowly bubbling up through the Magi's demented mage school, he was finally in an actual lecture hall, listening to a real Magi lecture on the nature of magic.

Those words turned out to be a letdown. They were equal parts propaganda and theory, and half of the theory seemed to be conjecture that disagreed with some of Simon's own theories, but even that was progress. He'd proceeded from grade school brainwashing to high school brainwashing.

Magi Karala would call on acolytes at random and ask them questions at random, like, "Why is it you must begin every spell with the same word?" or "What is the fifth word of our lord, alphabetically?" then capriciously mock or punish them when they got the answer wrong. Sometimes, she would even whisper something and make them cry out in pain.

What is that word? Simon wondered, wishing she'd speak up as he tried to read her lips. He had no real desire to use a word of pain on someone, but he would dearly love to know it.

It was hardly fair; most of the questions had to do with memorization more than knowledge, and even though he knew more about magic than anyone in this room, it was rare that he even had a good guess.

Fortunately, no one ever asked him. Shadows were not to be spoken to and were not expected to know anything. They existed to listen and learn, and at least here he wasn't relearning the alphabet. They were at least discussing words of power; better, they had books where those words were written down, and Simon was permitted to look over his acolyte's shoulder as he learned about them. That, at least, was worth something.

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If I had known how watered down all of this was, would I have even bothered? He asked himself as he stood patiently behind his acolyte's seat, listening to her lecture about the 'will of the God-King.'

He wasn't sure, but if he hadn't, he probably never would have come to hate this group so much, and as this life dragged on, his hate for the Magi was becoming one of his most cherished possessions. He was planning to use it a great deal in future lives when he taught these people the importance of humility.

Broadly speaking, the Murani people were nice enough, aside from the whole slavery thing. The rural horse tribes were actually very welcoming and respectful of strangers they didn't perceive as a threat. Even the common citizens of the capital were people, just like anywhere else in the world he'd been to. Their ruling caste and their self-serving views on the nature of magic, though, were positively maniacal.

Just think of how easy you'll be able to impersonate one in later lives if you need to pretend that you're one of them, he told himself, trying to stay positive.

For that, at least, he'd need all the help he could get. It was hard for him to stay passive, let alone positive, in the face of so much cruelty. The entire system seemed built to torture the lowest people on the totem pole, and he saw someone snap under that pressure on his very first day.

It happened when their Magi teacher asked a boy to produce a pyramid with a word of illusion. He'd tried to obey twice. The first time, he flubbed the word, and nothing happened, and the second time, he'd cast the spell, but it was an ugly, misshapen thing with no real visualization. It was neither a replica of the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles, which Simon would have tried to create to show off, nor was it a bland, idealized pyramid.

When he failed, the teacher punished him with pain. He responded by doing the unthinkable and trying to lash out with a word of lesser fire at her that reached less than halfway to the lectern. That caused a stunned silence to fall over the room.

The red-robed magi reacted instantly and used a word of distant nullification on him even as a minder stepped out of the shadows and beat the disobedient child senseless. As his unconscious body was dragged from the room, Simon wondered what would happen to him.

Even after the boy was gone, silence reigned for the rest of the day. Simon chewed on what had happened more than the meal he had that night once they were released. He couldn't ask anyone about it, but he listened to every rumor within earshot without much luck.

When the whole thing repeated itself the following day, he saw no reason to change his very dim outlook on the whole affair. The most interesting part of the classes quickly became the book that the students read from.

It certainly wasn't the teacher. Though he'd held high hopes at first, he quickly revised those downward. The sorts of things that she tested them on mostly revolved around the 12 words that the students were given access to in their texts. One was the lesser word, which they were told wrongly was the key to all magic, and the rest were a smattering of the least dangerous words he had, along with very limited meanings.

Of course, the word of fire or ice could never be called safe, but they weren't nearly as dangerous as the word of transfer. Either way, it didn't matter to Simon. He already knew all of them, so all he could do was hope that some new context would accidentally slip into one of the lectures as he watched the students struggle with basic concepts that he'd long ago mastered.

The exercises were all fairly rudimentary. Use light to make this shape, use ice to freeze this bowl of water, produce fire, or make your book levitate with force. Despite their simplicity, though, it was far more common for a student to fail than to not. This only rarely resulted in them injuring themselves. Usually, they just coughed and gave that familiar sour expression that never failed to remind him of the sulfurous taste that came with getting a word wrong.

Really, the whole thing was an exercise in nostalgia for him. He watched the acolytes struggle with all the different things he'd worked through early on. He saw people fail to pronounce the word properly, fail to give it the correct amount of intent, imagine the results imprecisely, and everything else someone could do wrong.

None of those were the real mistakes, though. The real mistake was in failing to correct the mistakes properly. The fault lies with the teacher, he decided very quickly, not with the students. Simon's only two students had exceeded all of these boys and girls in less than twenty-four hours, and the reason for that was because he'd offered them detailed feedback and personal explanations. They could do the same thing here, but that wasn't the point.

The whole point here was to make them feel bad and be beholden to the Magi, Simon concluded by the end of the first day. If magic is easy, then anyone can do it, but if it is hard, then everyone has to supplicate and venerate those who have it.

The teacher, on the other hand, was good only for entertainment, though he was careful not to smile when she berated someone. She had a few tests she used for each word, and they were quite repetitive. Give a lecture, embarrass a couple of students, repeat as necessary until the sun had set, and the children could be let loose on the dining hall once more.

The newness of this latest experience quickly wore off and was replaced by a growing bitterness. Every time he saw a child dragged away by a Minder for some terrible punishment, his desire to burn the whole place down increased.

Mostly, the children meted out their own torments to keep each other in line. Everyone lived in fear that if you got a Magi involved, things would get infinitely worse. Simon was in this new class for less than a week before he learned how children sometimes died. Unfortunately, it was the same day he learned that his time here would be coming to an end sooner rather than later.

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