It’s all part of the brainwashing, Simon reminded himself as he lay there pretending to sleep. It was hard to sleep on cold stone, but he eventually managed. Still, before the world faded to black, he lay there for at least an hour pondering his current predicament and second-guessing himself.

Am I being too meek? He wondered. Should I have begged for something to eat or asked more questions? He wanted to behave like all the other kids, but he had nothing to compare himself to, even after spending weeks and weeks playing with children in an effort to remember what that was like.

He didn’t even notice that he’d slipped off until the dull, brassy blast of a horn echoed through the complex, waking him immediately. Simon had spent years waking to the gentle chime of Hepollyon’s gong, but this was the opposite of that comforting sound. It was a discordant roar that was loud enough that he felt it through the stones he was lying on.

He was up immediately, and after a look around as he struggled to remember where he was and what he was supposed to do, a light-skinned slave gestured and said, “you best hurry, boy, or there’ll be nothing to eat when you reach the top.”

That was when Simon remembered. He was supposed to go to the top of the pyramid and find his class. He thanked the man as he dashed out the door and started running across the plaza toward the giant step pyramid that dominated the area.

He’d expected some step between waking up and class or whatever it was he was moving toward. That would have made sense, but then, it also would have made sense to put the lowest class at the bottom of the pyramid. He didn’t let these eccentricities annoy him, though. Instead, he tried to see the pattern in the strangeness and understand what it was telling him.

Well, he would later, at least. More data and time would let him figure out what in the hell these assholes were trying to do, but he lacked the bandwidth to ponder larger questions once he started on the stairs. Even in a miraculously young body, running up the steps of a hundred-foot-tall step ziggurat wasn’t easy, and before he was halfway up, running and breathing were the only things he could focus on.

No matter how tired he was, though, he was still able to take some pride in passing many of the other boys despite their seemingly earlier start. The black-robed boys were older and taller, so they ran faster than him, but he ignored them. He was only in competition with the other brown-robed boys and girls who ran just as quietly as he did up the stairs. They said nothing as he passed them; most didn’t even look at him as they were focused on their own struggle.

As he wondered idly how many years people would have to run up and down the stairs, he noticed that the pyramid was made of sharp-edged basalt stones. While it was brightly painted with murals on each level, it was hard enough that the stairs showed little wear, though he wasn’t sure how long it had been standing here.

Accounts differed in Zurari and tended to range between centuries and forever. Today, history wasn’t his concern, though. It was keeping his eyes open and mouth shut.

When Simon reached the top floor, he was breathless and sweating, but he was apparently one of the first to arrive. He was handed a bread trencher filled with porridge by a woman in gray robes who seemed to be his new teacher.

She didn’t seem much kinder than the minder who had tried to put the fear of God into him last night, but she did nod and say, “Punctual. Excellent. That will serve you well here.”

Simon considered thanking her, but it felt wrong, so he resisted the urge. Instead, he took his food and walked to the edge of the pyramid, not so far from the stairs, and gazed down at everything. First, he looked at the stairs and the students still struggling to come up them. Only the students in the brown robes came all the way to the top. The black-robed students only went halfway up, and the few Magi in colorful robes that were out and about this early stuck to the courtyard. They didn’t even come up to the first floor, which continued to strike Simon as exactly backward.

Once his food was cool enough, he started to eat. It was an awkward exercise without a spoon, but he used pieces of his bowl and made do until there was nothing left of either of them. As he ate, he watched the other students arrive, and he noticed that the food they were given decreased in both quantity and quality. After a while, they were given only bread and eventually nothing at all.

Simon thought that was the worst it could get for them, but the last few got worse than nothing. Up until she’d carried a long slender pointer, which gave her as much an air of authority as her gray robes. However, it was only when she started to whip the latest boys with it like a switch that he understood why his classmates seemed to fear it.

Simon thought that was an interesting twist, but the last thing he was going to have a chance to do was examine it. Instead, when the final student arrived, the teacher waited only a moment before calling the class to order. Simon expected to be forced to give some awkward introduction then, but that was skipped too.

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Instead, he sat down with everyone else in a wide semicircle that occupied most of the top floor of the pyramid. Unlike the exterior of the building, the interior was spartan and undecorated. The room had a large blackboard, and there was a large spiral staircase winding down into the darkness on one side of the room. That seemed to be the absolute center of the pyramid, but everyone else ignored it, so he did, too.

When everyone was assembled, she led them in a prayer to the God-King of the world, which struck Simon as a little funny because he did not, in fact, rule over most of the world that Simon had experienced. Still, he kept that amusement from his face and did exactly what the young boy to his left did, down to the mouthing of the words and the hand motions.

The whole thing had a rote feel about it, and only a few of his fellow students, or initiates or whatever it was they all were now really seemed to care about them. Simon cared even less than they did, but he did his best to fake it. Something about having to be at the front of the pack to get your breakfast made him think that it would probably be for the best if they considered him to be devoted as soon as possible.

Even just standing there and doing the same things as everyone else earned him enough looks from the boys and girls around him that he was certain they recognized him as the new kid. The teacher said nothing, though. The most she did to acknowledge that he hadn’t been there yesterday was to hand him a slate and a piece of chalk after she started to discuss the lesson, which turned out to be learning to write.

Nothing could have been a bigger waste of time to Simon. He knew how to write in dozens of languages, but there was nothing he could do about it as he instructed everyone in the correct way to connect the letter to other letters in the flowing, cursive fashion that the Murani used, depending on what words were involved.

Simon did as he was told, though he was careful not to make his lines too crisp or his forms too perfect. He was careful to be diligent and act as if he was devoting real effort to this, because their teacher often lashed children who became distracted at random.

Still, even as he did so, he tried to look for some hidden subtext. He thought that perhaps there was some mystical symbolism in the words that she chose and that there was a certain similarity of the shape to some of the words of power that he knew.

Simon struggled with looking for a deeper meaning until he finally gave up around lunchtime. In the space of four hours, they hadn’t even managed to cover four letters. At that rate, it would take almost a week before they covered all thirty-one letters in the Murani alphabet.

Simon despaired at that as gray-robed servants came up from the stairs and handed out pita bread stuffed with rice and grilled vegetables to everyone in attendance. The food was decent and filling, but the idea that he’d gone through all this and leaped through so many hoops to put himself in a remedial elementary school class hurt his soul.

You’re supposed to be a street rat orphan, Simon chastised himself. Half the kids in this room are probably. Literacy is kind of a prerequisite to gaining magic, and most of these kids probably don’t have it.

They were wise words, but they didn’t help as much as they should have. Though the plain brown robes that everyone wore hid people’s origins and social status, the way they talked revealed all that and more, and Simon learned a lot over lunch as people peppered him with questions.

He gave out his name freely enough, but whenever possible, he tried to turn other people’s questions into questions of his own because just giving away information would mark him as a sap and a pushover. When one girl asked him which tribe he was from, he shrugged it off and said, “If I told you I was Tzullian or Byrall, would that get me to the good part faster?”

Another boy followed up to ask if he was from a merchant family based on the clans he’d name-dropped, but Simon ignored that too and countered. “I thought I was here to learn magic and serve the God-King, not become a scribe!”

That made a few boys smirk, and at least one laughed out loud, though he stopped immediately as soon as he’d drawn the eyes of the teacher.

“Magic is later,” another girl promised him. “Our ruler, in his infinite wisdom, put magic in words so that the peoples of other nations can never use it against us. So, first we must learn to read, then we will learn to read magic.”

Simon pretended to accept that explanation, even though he knew that magic was spoken and written in an entirely different language. If that was the explanation they gave to eager young children, at least it made sense, and he could accept that whatever stories he was being told were for an intended audience that he was only pretending to be.

The break was short, but the day was long. Despite his fears that it would take forever to get through the alphabet, it looked like it was planned that way. Even though he couldn’t detect any traces of magic in it, he could see that it was a sort of rotating curriculum that covered the same topics over and over so that students could learn by repetition. That made a sort of sense, since the class was always filling with new students and losing those who graduated. Still, simple math told him that he was doomed to be here for weeks at least.

There were nearly fifty students in brown robes. If two to three were being added to the class every week, and a similar amount were moving on to become acolytes, then that was still three to six months here learning things he already knew and pretending to suck at them. That was the worst part, he decided as he traced the fifth letter of the day. If this was detailed calligraphy practice, he would have embraced it.

Fortunately, just as he was about to go insane, they were given free time to work on art for a while. Given how harsh everything had been up until this point, that surprised him until he remembered that artistic ability was one of the things that he’d been tested on in the selection.

Well, at least they’re trying to develop imagination as much as knowledge, he told himself as he wiped his slate clean with his sleeve and tried to decide what it was he could draw. This wasn’t what he’d expected, but he’d make his peace with it if he could learn the answer to some of the deeper mysteries in this world.