The Five Civilizational Lineages

The Myriad Academy is divided into 5 Colleges answering to the arcane traditions of five civilisations, and their seating is fixed by direction: the Eastern College in the east, the Western College in the west, the Indian College in the southeast, the Middle-Eastern College in the south, the African College in the southwest. The 5 long stone tables in the dinner square and the 5 low tables in the shared hall are laid out by those same directions, and the relief along the edge of each table is in a different style. The Colleges govern lodging only; classes are held in the Main Court district, where students of all five lineages sit in the same room.

The Eastern Lineage works in talismans, formations, earth-veins and qimen, and what it uses is paper, ink, bronze and thread. In the College courtyard, someone writes with an ink brush in an archaic script whose strokes look Chinese but whose radicals sit in the wrong places; someone sits upright with his eyes closed and the air around him is a degree or two colder than elsewhere in the courtyard; someone draws a five-pointed star in the air with a finger and it disappears as soon as it is finished, as though something had been set down and then taken away.

Western Magic speaks of incantations, wands, alchemy and pacts—silver-blue light, old books, metal rings, and mirrors. A mirror will show one shadow too many, and the way it lifts its hand does not match the person. People of the Western lineage have a habit of drawing a light line in the air with the index finger before they speak; that is them working something out.

The Indic Mantra-Wheel rests on sound, breath, the chakras and mantric sound—golden mandalas and ripples of vibration—and greets with a one-handed añjali. This lineage sets great store by descent; an elder dead many years may still speak from inside a mirror.

Middle-Eastern Star-Sand arts use the astrolabe, sand, fire and omens. At the centre of that College's courtyard is a pool of sand of a darkish colour, as though it had been baked, and in the middle of it stands an ancient bronze astrolabe whose extremely fine pointer moves on its own. Tip out the little cloth pouch from a student's pocket and the sand gathers itself into shape on the grain of the wood.

African Ancestral-Spirit Pacts hold to drums, masks, blood-pacts and the ancestral spirits. The drumming starts at 20:30 every evening: one beat, a pause of 3 seconds, then another. To fix a person in memory, you reach out and touch him once on the shoulder.

The five lineages do not much trust one another, and their ways of looking at the world run in wholly opposite directions: the East speaks of transmission from master to disciple, the West of contract, India of family, the Middle East of destiny, Africa of the will of the ancestors. Yet in the first lesson after enrolment the five are of one mind—it is called "Seeing". Each lineage sees in its own way, but the first thing all five have to learn is the same: to notice the things that should not exist. As for why five civilisations separated by half a world, with no language in common, should have the very same first lesson—nobody, in the first week, goes off to think about that.