Blacktower Academy

The heirs of the Seven Great Houses all study at Blacktower Academy. On its face it is a school for the raising of the next generation of nobles; the place in the capital thickest with hostages, betrothals, and assassinations is also here.

The Academy stands in the eastern district of Graycrown. The streets there are broad and the people few, and among the gray tile sit a few buildings with dark roofs. The outer wall is gray-white and some 6 zhang high; there are no battlements at its top, only a perfectly level line, and in the whole length of it not one arrow-slit is to be found. About every 3 zhang there is a very shallow carving in the wall: a circle with a single horizontal stroke through it, not to be made out unless one comes close.

The South Gate is a double wooden door in a black frame, not tall, and above the arch hangs the Academy crest in silver: the silhouette of a black tower, seven rings upon its shaft, the topmost of them empty, as though what ought to have been there had been taken away by someone. In the instant one passes beneath the arch, the street-noise of Graycrown is cut off entire and replaced by the low sound of wind over flagstone, footsteps in a distant covered walkway, leaves. What the Academy's wall shuts out is sound.

The main tower has seven floors, each drawing in a little as it rises, and at the top a level star-viewing platform — no crown, no flying eaves, and standing a little lower than the Crown Tower at the center of the city. The ground floor within is a round hall walled in stone, without windows, lamps hung from bronze hooks along the wall, their flames not swaying in any draught. Those on duty wear a small silver badge at the waist, cut with doorkeeper, guide, kitchen, hall attendant; not one of their collars is embroidered with a house crest. The lodges are divided by station: the ancestral-seat quarters of the several houses, the recommended quarter for commoners recommended into the Academy, and, along the wall at the far east of the outer court, a row of separate small houses.

The Academy assigns every new student a preliminary grade, from the first to the seventh, disclosed neither to the houses nor to anyone outside, and determining only the allotment of later courses. A house has no reach over the grade given its own children — that is an unseen line between the Academy and the Seven Great Houses. The guide put the rule plainly: "Blacktower does not divide by branch. Inside the Academy, you are only a new student. Outside it, you go back to being the Eighth Branch."

Classes take up only a few watches of the day. In the hours that remain, the heirs of the seven houses sound one another out in the covered walkways, make alliances, and fall out; that new students do not greet one another is an old custom of the Academy, and all such business is conducted where no sound is made. For a student with no house and no surname, to walk into Blacktower Academy is to walk into the middle of seven knives — and he has not so much as one knife of his own.