Free The Fly Guild by Todd Shryock Page B

Hope
you’re pretty smart. Otherwise, that’s a tough one. Mistress Glitter teaches
that one. She’s nice to look at, so even if you don’t take to the languages,
you can stare at her tits.” Huck winked at him. “Come on, this way.” Huck led
him through a door and into another hallway. This time the doors all had
numbers on them. Huck stopped in front of the door with his number on it. “You
can figure out the rest, can’t you?”
    Quinton nodded, glancing down the
hallway where he could see the number eight door.
    “Good. I’ll meet you outside. If
you get out before me, just wait across the street from the main door.”
    “What’s the point of all this
schooling?” Quinton asked, as Huck started walking away.
    “Only the best can be masters. It’s
what sets us apart from other gangs. We’re smarter.” He pointed at his head,
sporting anything but a smart look on his face. “Honestly, I think it just
makes the masters feel more important.”
    Quinton watched Huck disappear
through the doorway before slowly opening his own door and entering. Inside was
a barren room with no furniture, save for a small table at the front. A woman
was standing over the table, looking through a pile of scrolls neatly piled on
the table. She was probably in her late 20s and had a youthful face, with eyes
that looked much older. Her dirty blond hair was worn in a long braid that hung
down the middle of her back almost to her waist. Her crimson dress had several
beads sewn on the front of it near the neckline, which sparkled in the light of
the fading sunlight that came through the room’s only window. The dress at one
time had probably been stunning, but the years hadn’t been kind to it. Small
stains and tatters were evident upon closer inspection. The dress had a small
cutout below the neck that exposed her large cleavage, which Quinton stared at.
The woman glanced up at him, said nothing, and went back to picking through her
scrolls. After another moment, she looked up at him again and frowned.
    “Sit down,” she said disgustedly.
“First time?”
    “Yes,” Quinton stammered.
    “Sit down with the others,” she
said, motioning to the dozen or so other maggots who were seated on the floor.
Quinton recognized a few faces from the boys who were arrayed in an arc around
the table. They were looking at him with a blank expression, so he made his way
to the end and sat down on the rough wood floor. “I’m Mistress Glitter, for
those of you who haven’t already been under my tutelage. This is languages. Who
in here can tell me why languages are important?”
    There was no answer, and Glitter’s
face turned to a scowl. “Come on, now, someone answer me or I’ll start knifing
each one of you until I get an answer.” The look on her face told Quinton that
she meant every word that she said.
    A boy in the middle raised his hand
half-heartedly, his arm barely pushing his hand above his head.
    She acknowledged the boy with a
simple flick of her head.
    “Because it will save us some day?”
    Glitter sighed. “Yes, maggot. If
you are lucky and can pull your head out of your ass long enough to take a look
at the world around you, you might realize that something you are looking at is
something that you have seen before in this class. And at that moment, you
might realize that what you are reading is a wizard’s curse, or an Elvish
warning or the Dwarvish symbol for gold vault.” She paused to move a scroll
that was trying to roll off the crude desk. The boy next to him whispered, “I
ain’t believe in Dwarves” before Glitter continued, “And at that point, you
will know what to do. If you don’t read the symbols properly, then you’ll be
guessing.” Her eyes scanned the class, hesitating at each boy for a moment.
When she got to Quinton, he stared back at her. She was quite pretty, and would
be more so if she smiled, but he doubted that she had ever smiled in her life,
or at the very least, not for a very long