The Redemption of Desmeres

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “Father, dinner,” Genara said, placing down the tray on the top of the dresser.

  “Hrm?” he muttered, glancing vaguely at her.

  A second or two of confused staring passed and finally his expression changed to one of recognition. His eyes lit up and his mouth rose into a smile.

  “Genara! When did you get here, child?”

  “Just a few minutes ago. I’d expected you to be sleeping or I would have said hello. You should be resting.”

  “Bah,” he said, waving his hands. “Plenty of time for rest when I’m underground. These two hands can still earn their keep, even if my legs have given up the ghost.”

  Genara unfastened the anvil and took it away, then took the hammer and tongs to place them back where they belonged. In doing so, she dislodged the ring and turned it about in her hand.

  “Father, are you supposed to be doing this?” she asked, holding up the offending piece of jewelry.

  It was a curious shape, the outside perfectly smooth but the inside bearing an odd and distinctive design. If one were to scrutinize that design, one might eventually recognize bits of the Northern Alliance seal.

  “Making rings out of copper coins seems like the sort of thing you could get in trouble for.”

  “Bah,” he repeated, with another hand wave. “If a man can take one coin and make it into something he can sell for two, he’d be stupid not to. Besides. The king is an idiot and could stand to have his face hammered into a more useful shape.”

  “We don’t have a king anymore,” Genara said. “We have a queen.”

  “Bah. I live in the capital. I’d know if that sort of thing happened.”

  “At least you remember where you live,” she said beneath her breath. “That’s more than some days.”

  She set the bowl before him and slid a small stool up to sit and help him with the spoon. It was a bit of a puzzle. Holding a hammer and tongs didn’t seem to be a problem for him, but maneuvering a spoon to his mouth was another matter. The very moment the tools of the jeweler’s trade were out of his grip, his hands began to visibly shake and any attempt to feed himself delivered more food to his shirt than his mouth. Genara supposed it was a matter of desire. For as long as she could remember, the man would sooner work than eat. Perhaps eating just didn’t matter as much to him as the last lingering bit of skilled labor he could manage.

  “Where is Lem?” he asked, opening his mouth to accept the first spoonful.

  “Sleeping, like you should have been.”

  “He should be sleeping. He works for a living,” he said sloppily. “Come to think if it, you work for a living. Why are you here?”

  “A rich idiot got himself involved with the Elite and they showed up while he was in bed with me.”

  “In bed with you? I thought you didn’t get that sort of work anymore. Too old.”

  “Yes, Father. That you remember. To be honest, if I’d expected him to actually pick me I wouldn’t have agreed to be in Klye’s little sampling. I’ve got better things to do these days. I organize all of the staff now. Keep the girls happy, healthy.”

  “So what happened with this one?”

  “Guilty conscience looking for forgiveness. Too much of a past to get it from a man of god, so he went search for a lady of the night instead. You should have heard the stories this one told.”

  She spooned out some more, then wiped his mouth when he’d accepted it.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well what?”

  “What sort of stories did he tell? I’m an old man who hasn’t seen much beyond these four walls in years. Lem’s only got stories about cutting stone and shoveling snow. You’re the one with some spice to your stories.”

  “Really, Father. Spice in my stories.” She shook her head. “For your information, there’s nothing spicy to tell. It was just nonsense, I’m sure. Oh! But he did give me this ring.”

  She held out her hand and twisted the blue ring in the light.

  “Gave you a ring? He hoping to make an honest woman out of you?” he asked, taking her hand in his trembling grip to turn the ring in the light.

  “I don’t think that’s what he had in mind, Father.”

  “This is glass.”

  “Yes. Made from an old wine bottle.”

  “You see him again, you don’t let him leave. A jeweler who can work glass like this is going to be wealthy, if he isn’t already.”

  “Don’t think that didn’t cross my mind. But I don’t think I’ll see him again. As I said, the Elite are after him.”

  “I was just telling Julia that earlier, glass jewelry. If I had the tools for that, we wouldn’t have to worry about money ever again.”

  She nodded and took a breath. “Julia. That would be your wife?”

  “Yes, yes. Haven’t I introduced you?” he said. “She’d probably like you.”

  Genara served up a few more spoonfuls. She wasn’t quite sure who her father thought she was right now, but he’d wandered off from the state of mind that recognized her as his daughter, that was certain. Julia was her mother, and had passed away twenty years prior. Since his mind had begun to go, conversation with him had become something of an art. He could lapse a decade between sentences, and if one were to say or do something that challenged his understanding, flawed though it was, he became terribly upset and confused. The trick was to figure out which pieces of the conversation hadn’t slipped away from his mind and rely upon those until he came back to a more suitable era.

  “So this man, he was telling some strange stories,” she reiterated.

  “Right, right. What was he saying?”

  “Apparently he’s holding these debts. He says he has great big books filled with the names of people who owe him a favor. No, no, it was his friend who they owe. The less said about that friend, the better… Anyway, he says these debts are the sort that pass from parent to child until he eventually collects, and… Is something wrong?”

  His eyes were wide, and gleaming with a sharpness and clarity she’d not seen in years.

  “You spoke to this man? The man with the books?”

  “Yes, that’s what I was saying.”

  “He was… he was young. But with old eyes. Looked human but had something else mixed in. You don’t get eyes that old without living a lifetime…”

  She watched him as his hands folded on the edge of his makeshift table. “Yes… Do you know him?”

  “Did he say… Did he say what favor he wanted? Did he have the books with him?”

  “No. No, he was going to get them afterward. But I believe his plan was to relieve the indebted. His partner is dead, you see, so he’ll never come to collect. This fellow believes he can redeem himself, wash his conscience clean if he can save these people from generations of owing a debt that will never be claimed I suppose.”

  “So… So the debts are done?”

  “That’s the message he was off to deliver.”

  He looked to her. “Genara… wake Lem. I had a letter. He was keeping a letter for me.”

  “After you’ve eaten, Father.”

  “No!” he cried, smacking his bowl away. “Now! Genara, I need this done in front of me.”

  “All right, all right,” she said, brushing away some of the gravy that had splashed upon her.

  “It’s in the… I don’t remember where. It is a sealed letter. It’s the letter. The one I told him not to lose.”

  Genara stood and hurried to the next room pushing the door open and stepping to the side of her brother’s bed. She knew better than to waste her breath trying to wake him by calling his name. The man was dead to the world from the moment his head hit the pillow. Instead, she gave him a hard shove, jerking him awake.

  “Lem, it’s Father,” she said. “I don’t know what it is, but I touched a nerve. He’s shouting about some letter he said he gave you to keep. Is this a real thing, or is this from before we were born?”

  He rubbed his eyes muzzily. “A letter. No, no. He did gi
ve me a letter. It was last year, when he was sick.”

  Lem pulled himself out of bed and stumbled to a chest of drawers beside the door.

  “He wrote it out himself. Sealed it with candle wax. He told me I was to give it to you if he died.”

  “Did you read it?”

  “I thought I was just humoring him. He was even less in his right mind at the time than usual,” he said, rummaging through the top drawer. “Here, I’ve got it here.”

  Genara took it from him. “I think you should come with me. The way he was worked up, it might take the both of us to settle him down again.”

  “Okay, yeah.” He wiped his eyes. “Let’s go.”

  The siblings returned to the room to find their father attempting to get the glass bulb off the end of his lamp.

  “Father, stop that,” Lem said, taking the lamp away from him.

  “Good, good, you’re both here. You have the letter? Burn it.”

  “Burn it?” Genara said. “Without opening it?”

  “This man of yours. The one with the old eyes. He said the debts were off? They were through?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then the letter doesn’t matter anymore. Read it if you like, but burn it after. I want to see that blasted thing turn to ash.”

  Genara ran a long nail under the crumbling wax of the folded page and flipped it open. Inside, a few lines of text were written in an unsteady hand. The letters were large and jagged, barely legible.

  “‘My Dear Genara. It hurts me to leave this to you. My freedom and your life did not come freely. They have a price. All of my life I have waited for a voice in my ear to tell me that price and to ask for it to be paid. I am dead now, so if the voice comes, it will come in your ear, or Lem’s. Do as it says, and if you near the end and the debt remains, pass it to your children.’ … Father, I don’t understand.”

  “Burn it. It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “What’s this all about, Genara?” Lem asked.

  “I was telling him about the fool who ran afoul of the Elite and sent me here a few days early. Father seemed to know him.”

  “Just burn the letter!” their father demanded.

  Genara stuffed the letter down into the bulb of the lamp and watched it take to flame.

  “There, it’s burning. Now explain yourself,” she said.

  He answered, slowly and steadily, but did not for a moment take his eyes from the burning letter.

  “You two… you remember what your father did. Before Julia. Before either of you. You remember what your father said he did?”

  “You were a miner. Up in the Daggergale Mountains. You mined copper, right?” Lem said.

  “You were a slave,” Genara said.

  He pointed a gnarled at her. “That’s what I was. Didn’t matter what I was doing, I was doing it because I didn’t have a choice. I don’t know how far back it went, but my father was a slave, and I was born into it. I would have died in it, too. Except this man of yours. The man with the old eyes. He showed up, and he had crates of gold. Never seen so much gold. Took… maybe a week, but he had the owner out of there and then it was just him and us. And he walked us all up, one at a time, and made us an offer. We could have our freedom, and we could have what it took to make a life of our own. All it would take is a favor and a drop of blood to seal the deal. Didn’t even have to write our names if we didn’t want to. Just as well. I couldn’t write mine. I took the offer. We all did.

  “Then I started to hear the stories. Other men I’d worked with… the favors they had to give. One man, Barkin, he had to leave the door unlocked in his new boss’s manor. That’s all. Boss turned up dead. Folks had to give away secrets, or give up precious goods… And it always led to bad things. And someday I could expect the same. Or you could. Or your children…”

  The last of the letter burned away and the old man leaned back into his chair. He looked as though a great weight had been lifted from him.

  “But no longer…”

  Genara watched her father, for the first time that she could remember, find a moment of peace. He shut his eyes and sighed.

  “I’m tired now. Help me to bed.”

  They unfastened his work surface and helped him to bed. When he was sleeping soundly, Lem set about cleaning up the spilled stew. Genara pulled the ring from her finger in order to lend a hand.

  “When this is through,” he grunted. “You are going to have to tell me what started all of this.”

  Genara held the ring to the light, gazing at the shapes carved into its surface.

  “It’s a long story… And suddenly it seems I don’t know the half of it…”

  #

  Fort Greenworth was a small cluster of stone buildings in the shadow of a mountain. It dated back to the earliest days of Vulcrest, a kingdom that ceased to exist when it joined with its neighbors to form the Northern Alliance. Once it no longer had to defend its capital, the fort had fallen into disuse, but skillfully built as it was from massive stones, the years had taken little toll on the place. It required little effort to restore it sufficiently to serve as storage for dangerous artifacts and lodging for the man unlucky enough to be their caretaker and cataloger.

  Commander Anrack and two workers arrived at midday. They rode a cargo sledge escorted by two of the former Undermine members. The sledge was loaded with a variety of food and supplies, as well as three large wooden crates reinforced with iron and scrawled with strange symbols. Out of a justifiable skittishness and superstition, the escorts took great care keep their distance from the more worrisome bits of cargo.

  They approached the one building with smoke rising, the former barracks, and began to unload. Anrack pulled himself from his seat beside the driver and limped toward the door of the building. His cane was less than ideal for traversing the barely packed snow that had accumulated on the disused road passing through the fort, which meant each step was a struggle, but a combination of stubbornness and pride kept him from requesting aid along the way.

  “Open up!” Anrack barked when he reached the door.

  “What? Who? One, err, one moment,” cried a frazzled voice from within.

  A few thumps and crashes rang out from behind the door, then the slide of a brace. When the inner brace was clear, the weight of the accumulated snow pushed it open and knocked back the man within the dim surroundings. Anrack stepped down from the snow and entered the barracks.

  The place was in utter disarray, but showed early signs of organization in small patches here and there. Though it was a large place—one hundred paces long and fifty paces deep—the interior had been stripped of most of the cots and other amenities previously used to house soldiers. Now crate after crate was stacked to the low ceiling. Several such crates were open, their contents scattered about them in the exact state of disorder they had been in when the record-keeper had finished rummaging through them. Anrack would have expected the storage area to be dark—such a large place would have been costly and pointless to light for a single resident—but instead a violet glow penetrated the place to its farthest corner. The illumination came from fragments of crystal stuffed into jars, cages, goblets, and anything else that could hold one. It was an effective, though decidedly makeshift, solution to the lighting issue. The only natural light came from a single oil lamp in the far corner beside the first of a row of shelves that lined the back wall. This first shelf was the only one with any contents. The rest lay bare and awaited the contents of the crates to be sorted onto them.

  “You, and you. Get the shovels and clear the doorway.” He turned to the keeper of the fort. “Is there a cargo entrance?”

  “Ah… Erm…” was the only reply.

  Anrack looked over his host. The record-keeper was not what one might call an imposing presence. He was short, barely coming to the commander’s shoulder, and exceedingly frail. Like so many residents of the north, he was heaped with layers of heavy clothing to ward out the cold. Heating the large, empty barracks for just one ma
n was as wasteful as lighting it, and unfortunately the crystals gave little in the way of warmth. Poking up from his official robes was a thin, aging head with drawn features and peculiar scars. Instead of the usual fading gash or feathery burn, the man’s scars had complex whorls and jagged corners. Such designs marred his right cheek and forehead, and a white eye patch suggested whatever had caused them had cost him his eye as well. His remaining eye was wide and shifting, jerking back and forth as if frightened of what might lurk just out of view and twitching every few moments. The man shivered like a wet puppy, wringing his hands and adjusting his fingerless gloves.

  “A cargo door. We have food and additional artifacts,” Anrack said.

  “Artifacts? Oh, yes, yes! I’ll, err, I’ll just open the cargo door then. Around the back. Northwest corner.”

  Anrack turned to the door. “Cargo to the northwest corner!”

  “That armor looks familiar, sir!” the keeper called as he shuffled with surprising speed off to the door to open it.

  “I am an Elite. Elite Commander Anrack,” he called back, thumping his way among the scattered artifacts toward the only habitable portion of the barracks.

  “Elite Commander Anrack? No, no, no. The Elite Commander is Trigorah Teloran!” came the keeper’s echoing voice. “Met the woman personally. She was, err, an elf. Yes, quite unmistakable race. The ears give it away. And the complexion.”

  “Elite Commander Teloran was killed weeks ago. Before the end of the war. I am her replacement.”

  When the record-keeper replied, he was bellowing from the far end of the barracks. “Killed? I would think I would have remembered that. But then, err, I’ve not remembered much lately. Mind has been in other places. To what do I owe this visit?”

  “I am visiting because—”

  A loud thump and piecing screech of hinges cut the reply short.

  “Say again?” cried the record-keeper.

  “You finish what you must and return here. Then we shall discuss the purpose of my visit!” Anrack called back in irritation.