The next morning Hamar was wakened by three silent adepts. He hardly had time to splash his face before his tunic was thrust at him. Two of them sped like ghosts around the room tearing down the bed curtains, rolling up the bedding, quickly shoving furniture back against the walls, until the chamber floor was bared and the room seemed no longer Hamar’s.
Hamar pushed his feet into his shoes but wasn’t allowed his cape as they took him out of the door. The tails of the ugly night-cleaner worms were still to be seen curling along the halls, finishing their rounds, and one of them invaded the chamber to suck out its majic atmosphere.
As the adepts marched, Hamar whispered, “Can you say what Eweh are? Please, tell me what Eweh means!” For some distance they didn’t answer, but as they slowed down one of them hissed, “Eweh are the chief witch doctors over all Africa. Yarboa is one of the greatest. You’re to see what they can do.” Suddenly they arrived at a door Hamar recognized by the basket outside it that had once had skulls in it. Only, this time the basket was filled with fresh brown heads, – children’s.
The adepts rapped loudly on the door. Then they backed off, and thrust him hard through it when it opened. The basket was dragged inside.
The door was shut.
….
Three days later Hamar was back in his bare room. His whole body was pale, his eyes haunted. He wrapped himself tightly in his cloak and cowered in a corner. The terrifying sights of what he’d seen wouldn’t leave him.
That night he fell into a strange sleep when a black atmosphere pressed him down. All the horrific forms and faces of the powers he’d witnessed crowded onto him and he rolled and twisted with their prods and torments, and banged himself around the room unable to wake himself up. They leered, enlarged, chased him down endlessly.
Worst was the vision of the nightmare court assembled over and over to challenge and accuse him for being pathetically weak and human, with Aktiarh seemingly presiding to decree painful punishments for wrong answers to their accusations. Again and again in the dreams he was ignored and betrayed as he begged for mercy or escape, his limbs and body finally aching from the unending tremens of fear as he crouched before his accusers.
When it ceased one morning at last, Hamar’s eyes were sunken in, his body wasted. An adept brought back his bedding, “You’d have strangled in these, I expect,” he said, coolly, as he spread out the pallet and the blankets, and pushed furniture back into place. A special jug of liquid was left for the boy to drink. When Hamar finally emerged from his den later that day he was steadier after leaving behind a full chamber-pot of purged toxins, his deathly pale face set like flint.
After that day he sat stony-hearted in his classes, a cold dutiful presence in their midst. Now he was allowed into the upper secrets of witchcraft, far above mere conjury and chants.
In the instruction on the majic of Gaul, a High Celtic warlock revealed that the academy’s goat-headed emblem was of the patron deity of their craft to whom all wiccans owed allegiance back in their lands, the many horns depicting many channels of power within their ‘god.’ Different crossings of angles between the horns were able to cause the summoning up of entities, enable forces to increase whenever similar lines were drawn on parchment or on trees or stones or walls or on the ground.
Hamar’s expression hardly changed as it was reinterpreted differently in the next class, one with higher-minded adepts keen to become higher beings, as instead embodying a five-sided star, the four horns symbolizing lines of mental force coming out of a pentagram hub completed by the goat’s pointed chin-beard, just as it would be inside their own heads when they meditated.
When they used callipers to calculate the cusps of mental power that could be formed via willpower and then to imagize that pattern in their own brains, he scribbled his notes alongside them without smiling, – now more than ever he would not commit to any of it or be under any of the schools, instead determined that none of them should know him, none should guess which order of learner he was despite every teacher scrutinizing him for it.
His path must remain his alone. He no longer revealed any fire in his eyes or lust for heights beyond, no keenness for their arts, they saw only his sharpness of insight in seeing to himself as he learned, – ever fixed on that one royal goal and the chance to be free, FREE, – beyond it all! – before the long captive years!
Hamar regarded all of it as the spiritual snobbery it was. There was no good majic, no bad majic, only everyone’s drive for the ultimate power beyond others, – despite what they told themselves. The truth of that was in his eyes when he looked at them.
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