Checkpoint Twenty-Five was located, in the mouth of a lateral drain emptying into the Cloaca at the same height as the inspection walkway. A small alcove approximately the size and shape of a vertical coffin had a "25" chalked discreetly inside it.
Johanna made a face, and the two women parted with a mutually warming hug and a squeeze of the hands. Then Alice went off alone to seek out Checkpoint Twenty-Seven, her own station. She tried to recall who'd drawn Twenty-Six, wondering if their paths would cross. She'd be safest to announce herself in passing, anyway, as a fellow examiner and not as a Candidate. But then, she thought, it doesn't necessarily follow 26 has to be in the Cloaca: maybe Johanna has to direct a proportion of hers back into a side-drain or up into the Undercity , and it could be parallel to here, or on the next level up. No way of telling.
Alert for the Emergency Drop zone that would precede her checkpoint, Alice speculated for a moment or two on the logistics and planning that must go into this.
We started a hundred and eighty girls off as First-Years seven years ago. A hundred and twenty boarders and sixty Day Pupils. Another new intake of a hundred and eighty followed on every year after that. A similar number of boys have always been pupils at this school. So effectively numbers doubled. OK, not all those three hundred and sixty pupils will be Candidates for examination tonight. A significant number, let's say half, come here only for the general education, and many of those leave for other schools, or for appropriate forms of professional training, at sixteen. I ought to know, I've packed a few off to the Archaeology College in Quirm with my personal recommendation. We even had one who started developing magical abilities and had to be transferred to the University!
Out of those training for the Black, let's say two hundred in each intake, quite a few will fail or eliminate themselves over the seven years. But we also get a dribble of late entrants or transfers from other Schools who balance out the Fails. And you have economics to consider, too. For established Assassins to make a decent living, you don't want to flood the market every year with too many newly-licenced Assassins. Even so, I calculate maybe a hundred and eighty Candidates of both sexes are doing the run tonight. Whoa, watch where you're putting your feet, Alice!
She stopped dead and scrutinized the ground in front of her. Outwardly there was nothing to distinguish the rough, pitted, mud-ingrained stone in front of her from any other part of the inspection walkway. But something didn't feel right. She laid full-length on the ground and inched forward, feeling with her fingers. Was that a slight instability, the merest shift? She tapped the stone with the pommel of a dagger. It had a hollow echo to it. She explored under the edge of the walkway and onto its vertical surface. Ah-ha! Nothing underneath, just a void… and a hint of a mechanism? Fresh oil on the fingers of my gloves. Let's hope it's oil!
Traps and Pitfalls number twenty-three: the Tilting Slab. The one that when you step on it, it lurches up and to your right with shocking abruptness and throws you to your right. Straight into the almost-water below. This is my Emergency Drop, evidently.
Alice drainholed her way past, skillfully climbing along the vertical wall to her left rather than trusting the walkway.
And there it was: number twenty-seven. The beginning of a flight of stairs ascending up and out of the abyss, most probably a service stairway. And a recessed cubicle, possibly where a drainage engineer long-dead had once had a necessary office to fill in the parchments and (she shuddered) eat his lunch? It had a discreet "27" chalked at the doorway, anyway.
Alice made use of it to organize her paperwork, and find a place to settle and reassure the caged messenger rats. She composed herself, and continued her interrupted line of thought.
Grune di Nivor told me that in the old days, with a lot fewer Candidates, it was the case that one member of staff would monitor and examine a single Candidate throughout his Test. Pteppic said as much, when I met him at the Unveiling (she suppressed an amused smile at the memory). Poor man, he drew Mericet as his Examiner. (1)
Today, it's more of a production line, like some wretched proletarian factory, Mericet said. With nearly two hundred, you don't have the leisure any more, so I'm likely to see at least four pass by me. That's if nobody Fails. And fairer, too, as Passing or Failing is no longer at the whim of one member of staff. Each Candidate will see up to four of us, briefly. So even if the student comes up against a Teacher who loathes them, and we all have the ones who are hard to love (she thought of Alexander Lavish and Deborah Rust) there are still three other chances to make good.
And besides, some people want to qualify as Assassins for the challenge of it, but they never practice. Or like Pteppic, their only inhumation is such a triumph of style that they retire afterwards, knowing they've hit a career best and become a Guild legend first time out.
She remembered Pteppic and smiled. It had been about halfway through the Senior Class training year, when, in accordance with Guild custom, a distinguished Old Boy had been invited back to the School to unveil a statue, in the Guild library, commemorating his career-best inhumation.
Apparently, there had been a cross-dimensional disturbance in Djelbeybi shortly after Pteppic's graduation that had meant that all 3,148 previous Monarchs had risen from their pyramids all at once and, not so much Undead as never properly died in the first place, had marched back into the living world to complain about the shoddy quality of Afterlife they'd received. At the same time, the entire pantheon of local Gods, giggling and insane, had returned to Earth, or at least to a Djelibeybi where normal maths and physics had taken a sabbatical.
Pteppic's achievement had been to inhume, in more or less that order, the entire pantheon of insane Gods, then the methodically insane High Priest responsible for bringing all this about, together with, simultaneously, 3,148 previous monarchs, as well as the entire age-old riparian civilization of Djelibeybi.
The commemorative plaque under the statue had been necessarily short, but conveyed the essential facts that all this had been brought about by Pteppicymon XXVIII (Viper House) with nothing more than faith in the conductive powers of a Number Three Throwing Knife.
Distinguished guests had been invited, the School turned out, speeches made, a guaranteed non-lethal running buffet and non-contaminated drinks had been laid on. Pteppic, who now defined himself as a business consultant, and who was known to have put in a bid for Crumleys, the prestigious department store in the Maul (2) (despite people grumbling it wasn't right for a foreigner, and a Djelibeybian foreigner at that, to own one of Ankh-Morpork's most upmarket retail emporiums), made an affable speech, noting that he'd quite like to come back in another few years to see how the girls were faring at his old school. If a lady Pharoah of his acquaintance were any guide, he suspected that women would prove to be even better than the boys at ruthless cut-throat dealings carried out in dark places.
Everything went well up until the moment the commemorative statue was unveiled.
Enquiries afterwards revealed that the Guild had been keen to be seen as a Sponsor of the Arts, and had chosen the radical and daring Daniellarina Pouter to design the Pteppic memorial statue so as to be at the cutting edge of modern artistic expression.
Ms Pouter's bronze of Pteppicymon XVIII casting down the Gods and the Massed Kings of Djelibeybi took the form of a sandtray. A large cat-litter tray, in which were studded bits of white marble and lengths of unraveling bandage. A bronze statue of an indeterminate creature that might, in a charitable light, have been interpreted as a cat, was seen to be squatting above the wreckage in a posture that was extremely unambiguous and completely unmistakeable. It had an indefinable look of satisfaction on its face – the sculptress, it was generally agreed, had carried that off faultlessly.
Even though Pteppic had been first to laugh, and had passed comment on the lasting rewards of the job, the Guild had been embarrassed. Again. But in default of anything better, the statue remained. Rumour had it that the Dark Council was wary of provoking the fiery sculptress's legendary wrath, and that not even a certified psycho like Jonathon Teatime would have cared go after her with an inhumation contract. (3)
Alice smiled at the memory, then took deep, regular, breaths to empty her mind of inessentials. She adopted a loose cross-legged sitting position, in a deep shadow from which she could see and not be seen, and waited for the first of her Candidates.
(1) See Pyramids.
(2) Think of Egyptian business consultant and facilitator Mohammed-el-Fayed, who against determined competition bought the very prestigious London department store Harrods, and still owns it today. A lot of fairly nasty racism and snobbery was thrown at him during that time. Pteppic comes over as more pleasant, personaly likeable and less sewer-mouthed than el-Fayed, but the parellel is irresistable! (I'm assuming that after abdicating the throne of Djelibeybi to his sister Ptraci, Pteppic would then have used his not inconsiderable brain to go into partnership with his Assassins' Guild clasmate Chidder. Some money would inevitably have been made in dodgy ways - again a parellel with el-Fayed's earlier career as arms dealer - but the association would have vastly benefited both old friends. There may be a story in this...)
(3) Shortly after this, however, Patrician Vetinari, an alumnus of the Assassins' Guild, found reason to nail her to that post again, this time by her other ear. "Balance and symmetry, my dear" he said, pleasantly. "Two of the very fundamental pillars of classical art!"