Scythe (Arc of a Scythe #1)(62)

Yet this great plain of numbness was not the worst place to be. Numbness was a mere purgatory of gray. No, there was a much worse place. Darkness masquerading as enlightenment. It was a place of royal blue studded with diamonds that glistened like stars.

? ? ?

“No no no!” chided Scythe Goddard as he watched Rowan practice bladecraft with a samurai sword on cotton-stuffed dummies. “Have you learned nothing?”

Rowan was exasperated, but he kept it just beneath a simmer, counting to ten in his head before turning to face the scythe, who approached across the expanse of the estate’s front lawn, now littered with fluff and cottony remains.

“What did I do wrong this time, Your Honor?” To Rowan, the phrase “Your Honor” had become a profanity, and he couldn’t help but spit it out like one. “I cleanly decapitated five of them, eviscerated three, and I severed the aortas of the rest. If any of them had actually been alive, they would be dead now. I did just what you wanted.”

“That’s the problem,” said the scythe. “It’s not what I want, it’s what you want. Where is your passion? You attack like a bot!”

Rowan sighed, sheathing his blade. Now would come a lecture, or more accurately, an oration, because Scythe Goddard loved nothing more than performing to the gallery, even if it was just a gallery of one.

“Human beings are predatory by nature,” he began. “That nature may have been bleached out of us by the sanitizing force of civilization, but it can never be taken from us completely. Embrace it, Rowan. Suckle at its transformative breast. You may think gleaning is an acquired taste, but it’s not. The thrill of the hunt and the joy of the kill simmers in all of us. Bring it to the surface and then you’ll be the kind of scythe this world needs.”

Rowan wanted to despise all of this, but there was something about honing one’s skill, no matter the nature of that skill, that was rewarding. What he hated was the fact that he didn’t hate it.

Servants replaced the dummies with fresh effigies. Scarecrows with extremely short life spans. Then Goddard took the samurai blade from him and handed him a nasty-looking hunting knife instead, for a more intimate delivery of death.

“It’s a bowie knife, like Texan scythes use,” Goddard told him. “Take great satisfaction and pleasure in this, Rowan,” said Scythe Goddard, “or you’ll be nothing more than a killing machine.”

? ? ?

Each day was the same: a morning run with Scythe Rand, weight training with Scythe Chomsky, and a nutritionally precise breakfast prepared by a master chef. Then would come killcraft administered by Scythe Goddard himself. Blades, bows, ballistics, or the use of his own body as a weapon of death. Never poisons unless they were on the tips of weapons.

“Gleaning is performed, not administered,” Scythe Goddard told him. “It is a willful action. To slip into passivity and allow a poison to do all the work is an embarrassment to who and what we are.”

Goddard’s pontifications were constant, and although Rowan often disagreed, he didn’t argue or voice his dissent. In this way, Goddard’s voice began to supplant his own internal moderator. It became the voice of judgment in his own head. Rowan didn’t know why this would be so. Yet Goddard was now there in his head, passing judgment on everything he did.

The afternoons would be filled with mental training with Scythe Volta. Memory exercises, and games to increase cognitive acuity. The smallest part of Rowan’s day, just before dinner, was spent in book learning—but Rowan found that the mental training helped him retain the things he learned without the repetition of study.

“You will know your history, your biochemistry, and your toxins ad nauseam to impress at conclave,” Goddard told Rowan with a disgusted wave of his hand. “I’ve always found it pointless, but one must impress the academics in the Scythedom as well as the pragmatists.”

“Is that what you are?” Rowan asked. “A pragmatist?”

It was Volta who answered him. “Scythe Goddard is a visionary. That puts him on a level above every other scythe in MidMerica. Maybe even the world.”

Goddard didn’t disagree.

And then there were the parties. They came upon the estate like seizures. Everything else stopped. They even took precedence over Rowan’s training. He had no idea who organized them, or where the revelers came from, but they always came, along with food enough to feed armies, and every sort of decadence.

Rowan didn’t know if it was his imagination, but there seemed to be more scythes and known celebrities frequenting Goddard’s parties than when he first arrived.

In three months, the change in Rowan’s physique was obvious, and he spent more time than he would want anyone to know studying the change in the tall mirror in his bedroom. There was definition everywhere—his abs, his pecs. Biceps seemed to inflate out of nowhere, and Scythe Rand constantly slapped his glutes, threatening all sorts of lewd liaisons with him once he was of age.

He had finally gotten the hang of his journal, writing things that bordered on thoughtful—but it was still just a sham. He never wrote what he truly felt, for he knew that his “private” journal was not private at all, and that Scythe Goddard read every last word. So he wrote only things that Goddard would want to read.

Although Rowan did not forget his secret pledge to throw the scythehood to Citra, there were moments when he willfully suppressed it in his mind, allowing himself to imagine what it would be like to be an ordained scythe. Would he be the type of scythe Faraday was, or would he accept the teachings of Goddard? As much as Rowan tried to deny it, there was logic to Goddard’s approach. After all, what creature in nature despised its own existence and felt shame for its means of survival?