Warlock Read Online Free PDF Page B

stubbornly devoted to your studies.” Dorteka pushed a scrap of paper across the table. The notes on it were in a paw almost mechanically perfect. “Suggested motivators for the feral subject Marika.”
    “The most senior?”
    “Yes.”
    The interest shown by the most senior was a bit intimidating.
    The sheet was filled with a complicated diagram for earning the right to visit Braydic or the city.
    “As you see, a visit to your friend requires you to accumulate one hundred performance points. Those are mapped out for you there. Leave to go outside the cloister will be more difficult to obtain. It is subject to my being satisfied with your progress. You will never get out if I feel you are giving less than one hundred percent.”
    Crafty old Gradwohl. She had speared to the heart of her and tapped forces which could make her learn. The thought of seeing Braydic sparked an immediate urge to begin. The opportunity to get into the city, too, stirred her, but less concretely.
    “I doubt that I will permit a city visit anytime soon. Perhaps we will accumulate several opportunities for later.”
    “Why, mistress?”
    “The streets could be dangerous for an untrained silth. We have been having a problem with rogue males. I expect the Serke are behind that, too. Whatever, silth have been assaulted. Last summer ringleaders were rounded up and sentenced to the mines, but that did little good. The brethren — those you call tradermales — may have a paw in the movement.”
    “The world is not so complicated on an upper Ponath packstead,” Marika observed.
    “No. You see the schedule and rewards. Are they acceptable?”
    “Yes, mistress.”
    “You will become a full-time student, with no other duties. You will accept the discipline of the Community?”
    “Yes, mistress.” Marika was surprised to find herself so eager. Till this morning she had cared about nothing. “I am ready to begin.”
    “Then begin we shall.”
     
    II
    Marika’s education commenced before the next dawn. Dorteka wakened her and took her to a gymnasium for an hour’s workout. A bath followed.
    Marika’s determination almost broke. She nearly broke her vow to obey and conform.
    A bath! Meth — of the upper Ponath, at least — hated water. They never entered it voluntarily. Only when the populations of insects in one’s fur became too great to stand...
    The bath was followed by a hurried meal prior to the first class of the day, which was an introduction to being silth. Rites and ceremonies, dogma and duties, and instruction in the secret languages of the sisterhood, which she hardly needed. She discovered that there were circles of sisterhood mysteries silth were supposed to penetrate as they became older and more skilled. Till Dorteka, she had no idea how much she had been shut out.
    She ripped through those studies swiftly. They required rote learning. Her memory was excellent. Seldom did she need to be shown anything more than once.
    She excelled in the gymnasium. She was her dam’s pup. Skiljan had been fast, strong, hard, and tough.
    The second class lay across the cloister from the first. Dorteka made her run all the way. Dorteka made her run everywhere, and ran with her. The second class was not as susceptible to rote learning, for it was mathematics. It required the use of reason. Silth naturally tended to favor intuition.
    After mathematics came the history of the sisterhood, a class which Marika devoured in days. The Reugge were a minor Community with a short, uneventful past, an offshoot of the Serke that had established independence only seven centuries earlier. Sustenance of that independence was the outstanding Reugge achievement.
    Silth had a history that stretched into prehistory, countless millennia back, when all meth lived in nomadic packs. The earliest sisterhoods existed long before the keeping of records began. Most silth had little interest in those days. They lived in an eternal now.
    Marika’s pack had maintained a