Rafen (The Fledgling Account Book 1)

by Y. K. Willemse

  Rafen looked into his eyes. The hand was raised again, and he burst out, “Play. You are going to play with me.”

  “Yes. That was a good guess,” King Talmon said. “Lean back, Rafen. We are going to play a Game called Questions.”

  “What are you going to do to me?” Rafen gripped the armrests of the chair.

  King Talmon twitched impatiently. “If you answer all you are asked well, then perhaps nothing will happen to you. You will go back to your cell and live many more years.”

  “What if I answer them wrong?”

  “You will die. Now lean back or you will die now,” the king said sharply.

  Rafen leaned back, breathing shallowly. The king moved behind the chair and lowered a blindfold over Rafen’s eyes. Rafen’s muscles tensed when he tied it tightly.

  “Sit very still, Rafen.” King Talmon bound Rafen’s wrists to the chair’s armrests.

  Rafen had not anticipated this. His heartbeat accelerated. He must have done something wrong without even knowing it. He had a horrid feeling the king somehow knew about his dream.

  “Now, listen carefully,” King Talmon said when he had finished.

  The room turned cold in those few minutes of silence. Even the dogs at the foot of the table were quiet.

  Then a voice spoke in his ear.

  chapter two

  The Game

  “Itizo, Rafen,” it said.

  A horrible thrill ran through Rafen’s body.

  “Ma nuaz sé numees?”Do you understand this language?

  A strong foreign accent lengthened the vowels and distorted each ‘n’ the low voice spoke. Though Rafen had never heard this language before, it was somehow within him. He understood it.

  It had to be a trick. What was the right answer?

  Silence fell again. It lasted for longer this time. Rafen became aware of an odor: something before him smelled dead, putrid. An odd humidity hung in the cold air around him. He held his breath, not sure if he was alone.

  “How old are you, Rafen?” the speaker asked in Tarhian.

  “Seven,” Rafen whispered. Philippe had got him the date of his own birthday from Roger, who had apparently known Rafen’s parents.

  “Where are you parents?”

  “Dead,” he said.

  “What is kesmal, Rafen?”

  The blood drained from Rafen’s face. It was a question he could not answer.

  “It’s - it’s a kind of metal,” he quavered.

  Silence. Rafen waited for King Talmon to shoot from wherever he was. He breathed frantically, feverishly.

  “What is sorcery?”

  “It is something we don’t understand,” Rafen said in a rush. He remembered the guards muttering about it once.

  “Have you ever done sorcery?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know your name, Rafen?”

  Rafen realized then he should never have betrayed that he knew it.

  “I gave it to myself,” he lied. Torius, one of the child workers in the mine, had named himself, astounding the others.

  “Truly?”

  “Yes.”

  A sharp metal tip touched his throat. Rafen cried out, then the Voices took over. They worked on his muscles and blurred his mind. At first he couldn’t understand what they were saying. Eventually, he heard music.

  “How do you know your name, Rafen?”

  Layers and layers of voices… Rafen was lost in a landscape of them. Bleak, chalky cliffs by a thundering, mottled sea appeared in his mind’s eye, so beautiful, because Rafen rarely saw anything beyond dark corridors and black tunnels. Rafen saw the source of the voices too: a great black cloud that blotted out the Eastern Ocean as far as the eye could see.

  “How do you know your name, Rafen?”

  Mesmerized, Rafen opened his mouth to reply in Tongue. Warningly, Phil’s pale face, framed by straw-colored hair, flashed before him. The black cloud and the cliffs vanished.

  Rafen clenched his teeth, willing himself not to speak. The voices screamed now.

  The pinprick of cold left Rafen’s throat, and the voices turned off. Reality returned to Rafen like a thunderclap. Shaking feverishly, he leaned back hard against the chair. Once, the guards had force-fed him a type of weed that had made him feel dizzy, everything swimming around him. It was nothing like this. This was sorcery.

  The low voice spoke again. “You are lying when you say you gave yourself this name. It is not a Tarhian name.”

  “Roger told me it,” he said in Tarhian.

  Roger was a foreigner. Whoever it was had to believe him now.

  Another long silence. Then at last, the person spoke again, very close now. His hissing breath brushed Rafen’s face. The smell of decay was acute.

  “I am not happy with you, Rafen. You have answered many questions… wrong.”

  Rafen closed his eyes in horror beneath the blindfold. The Game was over.

  “I am going to give to you one last chance,” the voice said, and Rafen felt relief slacken his muscles. “You are going to work as a slave in the mine for nine more years, until you are sixteen. You are going to obey. Obedience is most important… discipline is all we have. There is no love, no hate, no anger, no passion…”

  A finger touched his face, and Rafen recoiled involuntarily with another cry. It was slimy.

  “…these are all the illusions of our minds. Discipline is the only thing that exists, and it alone enables us to progress. You will obey.”

  The finger had found him again, and it rested against his cheek.

  “For if you rebel, I will find you and kill you. Pain does exist, Rafen. I will show it to you one day, if you make the wrong choice. If you make the right choice, when you are sixteen, you will be elevated. You will not be 237 anymore. You will be Rafen, my apprentice.”

  Elevated? Perhaps this meant Rafen would get what he most wanted. The phoenix feather appeared in his mind, glimmering.

  “I will give you what you dream of when you are sixteen,” the voice said, and Rafen realised in horror that he knew. “I will give you many things once you have learned the art of discipline. Now you will go back to your cell.”

  Rafen realized he was staring at a limestone wall across from him, no longer blindfolded or bound. He kneeled in his cell, entirely alone, unable to move.

  Chapter Three

  Philippe

  Philippe had taught him everything he knew. Short, lithe, and muscular from various jobs, he had once been a slave in the coal mine. His days there had permanently damaged his lungs, and now he coughed a lot. He had unkempt, straw-like hair and pale blue eyes alight with repressed energy – so different from all the tired, heavy-lidded eyes Rafen normally saw. Phil’s face was also full of lines – worry lines, smile lines, lines caused by deep thinking and plotting. While most Tarhians appeared similar to King Talmon, with brown hair of varying shades, brown eyes, long horse-like faces, heavy eyebrows, and a tall build, Phil was altogether un-Tarhian.

  As far back as Rafen could remember, there was loneliness and darkness. His cell door had opened, Phil entering amid flickering lantern light. Rafen had asked him, “Please, why am I here?”

  “Because you are different, Rafen,” Phil had replied. “And because you are different, you will not be here forever.”

  On the day they had branded him, Rafen had lain in a crumpled mess in his cell, clutching his ankle and sobbing. Phil had never hurt him. Phil had been all he had known for two years. The world was rude; he would not believe in it.

  Phil had come to bathe his ankle and give him bread. “It is like I said yesterday,” he had murmured. “Things are about to get much harder. You must become hard with it, but keep the softness of your heart – keep your love, your compassion. I will not leave you; I will always be back to help you.”

  “Why? Why do they hate me?” Rafen was only four. He didn’t understand they hated everyone.

  “It is not necessarily hate,” Phil had said. “They just love themselv
es too much. They have not singled you out yet.”

  “I am not going back to the mine tomorrow.”

  “Rafen, you must.” Phil rubbed his searing ankle slowly. “You must, until the day I say you do not have to anymore.”

  “What will happen if I do not?”

  Phil shook his head.

  “Please, Phil, what does the number mean?”

  “It means you are a slave.”

  “A slave?”

  “You are now the property of His Grace Talmon of Tarhia,” the guard branding him had said.

  “It means… you must do what Talmon wants until you are no longer a slave.”

  In the following days, Rafen tried to clean the brand off with his drinking water. Eventually, he gave up. He was very dirty from then on, his skin constantly blackened by the coal. He told Phil he was changing.

  “I hate my number.”

  “You will have to wear it the rest of your life,” Phil told him, pain evident in his tone. “Yet it does not change anything, Rafen.”

  Rafen cursed at him. He was now five. He knew how to curse.

  Phil seized the front of his ragged shirt and slammed him down on his broken bench, rattling Rafen’s teeth.

  “Don’t let me hear you say that again. That is not the language of the free.”

  It was then Rafen began to believe something, and now he knew it for certain. Phil even voiced it tonight in his cell.

  “You have to get out of Tarhia,” he said in Tongue.

  “I know,” Rafen whispered, sitting cross-legged on his bed of moldy hay. The shadowed limestone walls around him were windowless, being partially underground. Yet Rafen had light: the faint flickering light struggling through the tiny barred window in his cell door and the stronger candlelight Phil had brought with him, which stung Rafen’s eyes.

  Phil smiled. “You have changed. A day ago, you would have thought there was nothing beyond Tarhia. This Interview has done something.”

  He refused to call what Rafen had told him a Game.

  Rafen struggled to voice his thoughts. It was hard in Tongue, which Phil always insisted on speaking instead of Tarhian. “But, there is a special reason I must leave, yes?”

  “There is.” The creases on Phil’s face were pathways of gold in the candlelight. “Rafen, Talmon and his Master take a special interest in you. When you are older, they will either kill you or make you their personal slave because of your past and because of your future.”

  “Talmon’s Master?”

  “I believe that was the voice you heard. I cannot be certain. It has been rumored King Talmon has a Master: someone powerful that he is always in contact with. No one has ever seen the Master. But I am certain now he exists.”

  Rafen had never thought there was someone more powerful than King Talmon. The idea chilled him.

  “He said I would be his apprentice.” Rafen shifted forward on his hay. “He told me he would give me—”

  “He lied,” Phil said forcefully. “Those were lies, Rafen, all of them. You are a threat; he wants to control you. You must not listen to him.”

  Rafen’s dream world shattered. “Why am I a threat?”

  “You are too young to know.”

  Rafen could have thrown a rock at Phil. The most he’d been able to coax out of him concerning his origins was the story of how Phil had found him at age two in a cesspit one day, and taken him out and cleaned him up. After that, Phil had been instructed to keep Rafen alive until he could care for himself, when he was four and worked in the mine.

  “Rafen, please do not think about what he has said to you. He will try to rule you; he will promise you everything.”

  Again, Rafen saw his phoenix feather in his mind. He closed his eyes briefly, imagining it in his hands.

  “What he really wants is for you to vow allegiance to him and to be in his sight all the time once you are sixteen. If he ever asks that of you, you must say no.”

  Rafen remembered the instant transportation back to his cell that even Phil had been unable to explain. If Talmon’s Master could do that, there was no limit to his abilities.

  “I do not want to die,” he said softly in accented Tongue.

  Phil kneeled before Rafen, bringing the candle closer. Rafen’s eyes watered painfully.

  “Rafen,” he began, and then broke into a fit of coughing. After some time, Phil inhaled shakily and said, “Rafen, if you swear allegiance to Talmon’s Master, you will be a slave all your life, and after all your service, he will kill you. You will have given everything to serve him as he wishes, everything you believe in. You will have beaten yourself and forced yourself to submit, and you will have lashed slaves, given out numbers, ‘played with children’, and killed simply because he said the word. In the end, none of it will matter. He will kill you whether you love him or not. Do you understand me?” he hissed, thrusting the candle directly at Rafen’s face. Clapping his hands to his sensitive eyes, Rafen recoiled on the flea-infested straw, head throbbing.

  “Yes!”

  “I do not think you understand,” Phil said. “You will one day. One day you will know death is better than surrender.”

  Looking away, Rafen ran his fingers along the cracks between the stones in his cell floor. Slimy moss brushed his skin.

  “You won’t be a slave forever,” Phil said at last. “One day you’ll escape.”

  “I have to. But you told me it was impossible.”

  “I once thought it was. I saw men get shot for trying to get home to their wives. The people who did escape had nowhere to go and died in great pain in the end. It’s not impossible, though, not if you’re young, Rafen. You’re small and quick. Talmon and his Master have singled you out, but the guards don’t think of you as anyone special. You could get past them. I will help you get out.”

  “You’d escape with me?”

  “No, Rafen.”

  “What?” The word tore from Rafen’s throat. His head snapped around to face Phil again. “Phil—”

  “Shh.” Phil put a finger to Rafen’s lips. “No, Rafen. My place is here. I have to help the people I once hurt. You understand?” His tone became thick with grief. “Rafen, I once lived like the guards. I… stole someone’s wife. I shot two men. I played with—” He took a deep breath. “You won’t be like that. You will escape. You’re not safe here. Now listen carefully. There is a courtyard in this palace that’s seldom guarded. It hasn’t been for seven years. In the left corner, beside a wooden execution post is a door with a black serpent handle. I found out two days ago that it is the only unguarded door leading out of the palace. The men have used it to smuggle in weed and ale from the black market, which they hide deep in a well. In order to get to the courtyard, you have to pass a pair of guards somewhere along the way, often two corridors before. That’s all right, because when the day comes, I only have to move one pair of guards for thirty seconds for you to pass through safely. You will get to the courtyard and then you will escape. And thank the stars of your birth that your cell is on the outer wall of Talmon’s palace and not in his mine.”

  Phil’s eyes were glowing. Rafen’s brief excitement faded when a thought occurred to him.

  “I’ll have nowhere to go,” he groaned.

  “When the time comes, you’ll have somewhere to go.”

  “You have to come, Philippe.”

  “Rafen, you don’t understand,” Phil said, exasperated. “We are talking about things much bigger than you and I.”

  Rafen raised his eyes to Phil’s. His friend was already explaining the way to the courtyard where the door to freedom stood. Rafen huddled on his straw, shaking and tired. The thought of escaping tantalized him even while dread rose thick in his throat. So many things could go wrong. And he would be leaving behind his only friend in life. But if he stayed…

  He pulled up his right trouser leg and stared at the white number branded above his ankle: 237. He would be a slave all his life; only at sixteen he would be in a different kind of bonda
ge than before.

  Meanwhile, he and Phil were pitting themselves against Talmon and his Master… and who knew if they would win?

  Chapter Four

  Etana

  Calista Selson

  “Talmon, I have a task for you.”

  The Lashki Mirah’s words echoed in the gloomy courtyard around Talmon. The Tarhian king shifted uncomfortably on his knees while his Master stared down at him, his decaying hands caressing the long copper rod.

  In his youth, Talmon had thirsted for his Master’s power and fawned over the Lashki, drinking in his rotting presence. Then the days had come when it frightened him. The rapier-length rod called and called, and his Master gave the voices whatever they wanted.

  Now he didn’t dare look up. The sight of his Master repulsed him. Besides, he already knew what expression the Lashki now wore: a lofty, transcendent one intended for his next victim. Excitement would be gleaming in his Master’s black eyes because he, the Lashki Mirah, was as invincible as his victim was powerless.

  “Master,” Talmon said, “who is it this time?”

  “I am the King of Siana, Talmon.” The Lashki’s Ashurite accent lengthened his vowels. Talmon could hear the humorless smile in his tone.

  “Yes, Master,” Talmon said quickly. “Of course.”

  He had heard this before. Since his Master’s childhood in Siana, a land in the West, the Lashki Mirah had believed himself to be its unquestionable king. The Lashki was a native of Siana. The despised Sartians had voyaged from Sarient, ‘discovered’ Siana, and dominated the Lashki’s people, the Ashurites. Fritz was the first Sartian king of Siana the Lashki had killed, slitting his throat. Then Joseph. After him, Prince Thomas, on his voyage from Sarient to take the Sianian throne, had been stabbed multiple times in his cabin. The Sartians had smuggled Thomas’ brother, Prince Robert, over to Siana in a Ruyan merchant ship and crowned him in the hold. Then before the Lashki had been able to do a thing, Robert was on the throne, married to Fritz’s daughter Arlene, and thoroughly protected by skilled sorcerers. An attempt then on King Robert’s life could have taken years, and invincible or not, the Lashki couldn’t do it alone. So he had waited, building up a kingdom of servants all over the world, and at last breaking into the soul of King Robert’s eldest daughter, Annette.