Gods & Thieves ✔

7. Red and Blue

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Just like everything else about shamans, the cafeteria is designed in a building that once was a temple with white stone columns, spacious galleries, and a terrace opening to the blossoming orchard.

And as Gen promised, despite the late hour, the tables are neatly served and blooming with dozens of dainties from practically all over the world that make my eyes widen. I'm not sure I've ever seen this much food at once in my entire life. Is this even real?  Glancing around and making sure there are no familiar faces to start asking questions, I go for the food.

Nobody looks my way when I walk around, collecting as many eatables as one plate can hold, and stroll to a small table in the terrace's corner, away from everyone. The only reproachful glance I get is from a gray-haired, bony shaman who carries not food but a hen in his arms. Did he rescue it from the kitchen? I wonder, but dare not ask as I look after him, proudly striding with his restless bird between the tables. What for? A sacrificial ritual? Not much of a rescue, then. But only now do I realize that I'm the only one with a heap of food on my plate; others humbly take just for a bite or two.

Greed is outdated here, I remember my own thought from when I saw Loretto's apartments. But wouldn't it be? People try to get as much food as they can when they know tomorrow they can have none, earn as many aura gemcoins as those are hard to get--when a fortune is an achievement to brag about. But when you're a shaman with food always served for you, a magician capable of creating as many aura gemcoins as you wish, an achievement is to will yourself from consuming all at once, I guess. The most respectable way is the hardest, and for shamans, the hardest is the most humble. Maybe Loretto also felt proud of refraining from slicing me open the very first day. Of kindly letting me live.

Indignation burns my throat as I shuffle to my hermitical corner table, balancing plates for my grumbling empty stomach in my hands. My family works day and night to earn a living, while shamans here don't know how to spend their wealth and unnaturally long spoiled lives. Carrying chickens around like accessories!

I can't deny that the food is really good, though.

And the food is the most remarkable thing of my next few days.

No news from Cale or Kofi.

No teacher.

Other mentees don't seem to be interested in talking to me anymore, and nor do I wish to spend my time with them. Alone is safer. And my mentor doesn't care to appear anywhere near me as well. At first, it is relieving, but then...unsettling. When someone is away for a while, they definitely plan something big and bad, right?

I spend my days wandering the alleys of Tik'al, waiting as Cale ordered, making mental maps, listening to shamans' gossip, but--disappointingly--just like people in Cabracan, they talk about dull stuff like fashion, cheating neighbors, and work. Or magic, using terms that sound gibberish to my ears. At first, I feel wary of walking so freely at first, of exploring the place I've avoided like fire for my whole life, but it's probably just my paranoia. They think I'm one of them now, I remind myself.

And when the sun burns too hot, I hide in the library.  It's built on the underground floor, beneath the Great Temple, and it is huge. There must be some sorcery added to expand the place because the shelves arranged in rings stretch so far my eyes can't even calculate the length of the aisles between them. A town of book spines. Magicless folks aren't allowed further than the counter by the entrance in the center of the smallest ring, where they can order the books they want, but my mentee's bracelet gives me some perks.

I grab a couple more history textbooks to make it look like I'm actually an obedient student, a volume about sign language--I need to understand Yaling--and a dusty treatise about old mechanisms to figure out how to fix my great-grandfather's watch. Had I still had my aura ring, I could have uploaded all information from the virtual magical database and into a notebook, siphoned the words to write themselves out on the paper as I always had, but now I'm forced to do it the mundane way and browse library shelves.