The Hall was a pce where all the students and grandmasters ate. It is a roughly rectangur room about three times as long as it was wide, and, as one might expect, following the common theme of this pce, the Hall was cloud-scrapingly high. The massive canteen—I sometimes prefer to call it canteen—is a smelly chamber divided into sections for younger and older students. The older students often regard us with curiosity. Like a cat regards a mouse sort of curiosity. The grandmasters had their own separate tables, in the highest reaches of the Hall. Besides winding staircases, their area was accessible through the unseen corridors only they and the caretakers used. Never saw, or went all the way up there, only heard about it.
Scores of mps, fixed on long iron chains—each containing mostly shining Cobalts while fewer have Ambers and fewer still possess a couple of beautiful Viridians whose glowing emerald light is thrown into the shining pile—all combined to provide a pleasing, almost sumptuous light that is easily good enough for reading.
On the walls, a plenitude of handsomely decorated tapestries feature circles with crudely depicted images of familiars inside them.
Red and bck banners, with strange symbols on them, decorate the walls at the bird's-view level of the Hall's uppermost reaches; while at lower levels, midnight-bck and blue, chunky thick-knit banners are hanging down from balconies. Some of them seem to have been made by combining different sections of cloth, stained with barely visible brownish-bck blots. I never liked banners pced indoors. They are as still as statues. I almost want to jump and punch them, make the fabric come alive and ripple like waves.
Long cascades of swaying dusky-green drapes are pced at even intervals to give an illusion of openness or to decorate the commodious enclosure. The splendid drapes are securely attached to the wall with a thigh-thick hepatizon rod which seems incredibly wasteful. Maybe it's a steel bar coated with something to make it look like hepatizon. A silver-gray amarium holdback, shaped to resemble a braided rope, hugs the curtains open, framing lengthy elegant curves while every other pair of the luscious cloth, lining the distant walls of the Hall, is tied around the middle with arm-thick, golden-bck cords that end in dark-blue linen tassels. The hem of every drape is trimmed with a yellow stripe—without exception, the ample fabric of each has a mellow sheen, like some of my mother's best woolen tunics do. The ones used for ''special'' occasions, that she never wears.
Carvings in the form of tall arched windows are sculpted into pale red stone.
Thrown across the space all around me are many cavities holding statues of people and animals I don't recognize. Above and around me, there are very wide balconies where mostly older students eat. With annoying regurity over the past few months, more than a few of them would sometimes snicker and stare at us from above. There is plenty of room for all the present at the ground level but I can understand the appeal of being high up.
Lightly armored red-cloaked guards stand near almost every door and passage, they are generally scattered throughout the vast space of the Hall, some inconspicuously near the corners while others are quite the opposite and would occasionally patrol between the long tables and all the students. I'm not sure, but it seems this patrolling is concentrated on the ground level where most of the younger students are. Based on the way they move, some are mayhap partly made of stone—I still hadn't decided. As one might expect, most guards are rge and imposing, wearing their faces all stern-like, of someone who ate only boiled cabbage for a month; their disquieting presence stops any chance of discord before it even begins. Female soldiers don't sck behind in this regard and I wonder if all the members of the Crimson Guard went to the same school of grimacing faces and disapproving looks.
I stand in the serving line and move sideways grabbing ptes, utensils, and so on until finally my tray is stacked with appetizing and slightly salty-smelling food.
Today is a special day. Breakfast of rice, boiled eggs, a small chunk of smoked sausage, and two pieces of white bread—made of fine flour.
Nice. Today there is even a full cup of milk.
I can't deny, the meal looks rich and seems filling. Different from the usual artificial tasteless garbage or worse. There are a few unfortunate days each week when rough, smokey gray, pitted iron pots, taller than me, are used for boiling water with meat and vegetables inside to produce some yellowish soup that I hate. Honestly whoever was first who came up with the idea of putting meat in boiling water should be Thrown. The meat turns gray and the taste gets bleached out of it. These dungeons increased my appetite somewhat and in the past few months, there were a handful of days when I was much more hungry than ever before.
I move on with my tray to sit and feast.
Our css sits at a long stone-carved table with thirteen girls on one side and most of the boys on the other. It is one of many such tables in the Hall, those rgely unused are left bare. The naked red-pink stone of ours is hidden and the table is entirely covered with the rgest tablecloth I have ever seen. It is made of wool, in splendorous glossy satin weave and dyed honey-yellow of wheat—just about to be harvested. How in Allmother's name do they wash it?
The table has room for more than sixty students, making us scatter into smaller groups. Why do we do that? Most groupings have three members. Why not four or two? Well...there is one group of four boys. Maybe I'm just looking for patterns, or maybe four is a crowd.
