Call of the Chosen- Broken Kingdoms

by Michael DeSousa

  “You are a mean one,” she said in a hush.

  To that he shrugged and grunted, but he didn’t speed on ahead as he had all night, always putting distance between them. No, he just pulled his brim hat lower over his face and walked on.

  “May I ask you a personal question?”

  “Being polite? You?”

  “Would it make you more comfortable calling you by a pejorative?”

  “That would be a more honest change,” he said with a sigh. “But no, no personal questions. Once we find Gene, we go our separate ways.”

  “I see. Good.” Right? That was good. Yet, he seemed to know so much about her and Gene. Six years of the Empire looking into the two of them, into her family? How much more did he know? Was there a possibility he knew why she and her sister both became priests in the first place? Their family penance? The Cult of Ragnarok they belonged to? Sil tightened her arms across her chest, feeling vulnerable. Her parents went to great lengths to hide their past. Here, in Ladress, the purge was quick and a very long time ago with the Old Roz executions. But her family fled from the south where cultists were still sought out by the Steward-King. “Well, uh…you seem to know so much about me,” she said, trying not to sound defensive. “Yet I know nothing about you.”

  “I’m an investigator from the Empire, what else is there to know?”

  “Power over life?”

  “Yup,” he said happily.

  Sil continued anyway, trying to put him at ease, “What do you believe are the Chills?”

  He studied her with his one eye as she tried her best not to look too snarky. She was genuinely interested. After so much of her own study, a new perspective could be refreshing, albeit, probably not very enlightening considering who she was asking.

  “Why?”

  “In my formation, I studied a lot about them,” she explained. “The early works of Gustuv, the philosophies and spiritualities of the later Ragnor era, right up to those obscene experiments of the Old Roz family that disproved the Ragnarok spirituality but got them all executed—”

  “Those are just words to me, Sil. About people and subjects far above what I get paid to do. I’m sure they wrote down better answers.”

  She coughed, stopping herself from calling him a name. Instead, “Still…you said you’re not originally from the Empire? Where are you from and what do they believe the Chills are?”

  “Priests, always so damn curious,” he muttered. “You’re not going to drop this, are you?”

  “You can try ignoring me all you like, Mister Montgomery, but seeing how you decided on this desolate plain as our highway, I think you’d have a hard time of it.”

  “Alright, fine,” he gasped as he readjusted his hat. “I came to Siga’s lands from the King-Maker. Left when I was…” He glared at her. “A little older than you, maybe, when the last ‘king’ was ‘made.’” That was when the Amerand Dynasty fell to a revolution led by that Prophetess; Sil remembered it when she was only a few years into her priestly formation. Hundreds of years of one dynasty’s rule over a continent, now broken like Ladress. No wonder Markus was so cynical; he must think Hyliagor the King-Maker let him and his people down.

  “Any folk stories, myths or legends about the Chills,” she asked. “I don’t suppose you’re a learned man who knows how to read? Have you read books about them from your home?”

  He shook his head and chuckled.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing.” He crossed one arm around his chest, raising the fingers of his other arm to his lips. “Books huh? I think you trust them too much. They’re the only source of information I know that can lie to you with a straight face. But, no. To answer your question, nothing I haven’t already heard here. Uh, you know. That the Chills are dark and evil forces from deep within the world, overflow from the Dark Well. Those Ragnarok worship them, I think, right?” —Sil stopped herself from interrupting him; what he just said wasn’t exactly true— “Scary bastards, if any of them are still alive. Probably all killed by now, or underground, besides…uh….” He glanced at her.

  She smiled and nodded, urging him to go on.

  Markus gazed up to the sky with his one eye. “Well, here’s one you might not have heard. On the King-Maker continent, where I’m from. Far south, there’s a stretch of mountains that span the entire continent except for a few passes into the Southern Snows.” He shivered as if recalling a memory. “There’s some incredible ruins there, all over the place. Can’t image who used to live there. But the people who live there now say they descended from those who conquered the original inhabitants, the ‘Refugees of the Great Silence,’ they called them…well, best translation. They call themselves ‘Ryujin’s Children.’”

  “Ryujin?”

  “Means dragon god.”

  “Pagans,” she scoffed. Dragons weren’t real.

  Markus put up his hands. “I don’t know, Sil. I just know they have this practice where they go out into the tundra and pines where ever their scouts find the Chills and sit with them, feel them in the wind, and commune with them. Often, their old and or their sick young go willing without warding stones to give their bodies up for the Chills to take over—"

  “That’s horrid,” Sil gasped, so distracted by his story, she had to recast her icy wind on her shoulder.

  “Yea, it is,” Markus continued, sadness forming on his face. “To them the Chills are their long-gone dead sealed beyond the world and seeking to finish unfinished business. So it makes sense to them. I suppose when animals get infected, those long-dead weren’t too bright when they lived.”

  “Jokes? You joke? Those people are dreadful. They’re killing their own for nothing.”

  Markus’s lips drew to a thin line, his jaw tightened. “Go tell them that,” he said, almost barking. “You want to know what I think the Chills are? I don’t know. But, they’re not a sickness, some damn cold you catch from a night air. No fever can kill someone and bring them back to mope till they disintegrate. Gotta be something else….” His scowl deepened. “Something I can hate.”

  Sil slowed her pace to a few steps behind him, deciding not to pry further; she should have suspected it by the way he became so irritable since reaching that caravan. Maybe one of his own family fell to the Chills. Maybe he even had to—”

  “What are you thinking so hard for,” he said, slowing down to let her catch up. “You meet one infected and now you’re questioning the meaning of life?” He snorted. “Books. So disappointing, aren’t they?”

  “No, you loaf,” she replied, wishing she hadn’t sounded so defensive. “I was thinking that I’ve read so much about them, but…seeing them alive like that. I mean, yes, we do receive a few at the Temple from time to time, but I was never involved.” Thankfully.

  “Turns your stomach,” he asked. “It does mine.” But, no; it didn’t for her. Instead it made her wonder even more about what the Chills really were, their relationship to the warding stones scattered throughout Gen Shemver, and what that infected corpse said. It seemed to be able to think for itself. But the Ragnars were wrong, weren’t they? Chills were neither demons nor the long dead, nor dragon essences meant to metamorphose one into a dragon, neither could they be entities from other natural realities. A dangerous topic for her, considering her heritage. Besides, the matter was settled by the Old Roz Family. Their findings were conclusive. The infected were nothing but the victims of a cruel disease working its way through the brain and nervous system, though a disease perfectly suited for necromancy.

  Damn. If only she had one of her books with her now, or just a few of her notes. There had to be some precedent for that corpse constructing sentences at some time. Old memories of the deceased flared into life, or automated responses to audial stimuli. …But, she wasn’t a priest anymore; they wouldn’t let her visit the library now, not until completing her mission. And not even after….

  He looked longways at her. “You really believe that explanation of yours? An airborne infection
.” He laughed. “Is that what some dead family wrote down?”

  She looked away, blushing. “It fits the evidence,” she argued. “And, it wasn’t some dead family. The Old Rozes were a great house of naturalists. They even helped found the Holy City and the Temple Cornerstone. It was because of them we know so much. How to differentiate it from other fevers. You should have more respect.”

  “Uh…but didn’t you say they got executed?”

  “Yes. They went too far. The first King of Ladress beheaded half of them himself. And his wife, the Mage Queen, suffocated the rest.” Sil read about the Old Roz Heresy. The Nation of Ragnarok had been pushed south, giving the newly founded Ladress Kingdom and Old Rozes a period of peace to research the Chills. But their search for truth became no different than the Cult’s search for their god, no different than practicing Necromancy. And Necromancy was ultimately a fool’s hope for immortality. Capturing, incubating, and merging of Chills into whirlwinds of icy abominations. Purposely infecting victims, grafting monstrous bodies of animal, human, and rock to test the limits of the infection in the Old Rozes’s case or a suitable divine body in the Ragnarok Cult’s case. Her father had once said, ‘Knowledge is always subordinate to wisdom; the proud seek the former while the humble seek the latter and are rewarded with both.’ Is that what happened to you, Gene? Curious about our family? Did you study the same texts I did, and now you put your research to practice on that caravan? Sil still didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it. Her sister had to remain worthy to fulfill her priestly function, to come back to the Temple. She wouldn’t abandon everything their parents sacrificed. But Sil knew her sister. She knew how enthralled Gene could become to her own pursuits. “Oh Almighty, I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know,” Markus smiled wryly. “Ha! Good to know there’s somethings you don’t know. Who would have known?”

  Sil snorted. “You can joke all you want but a lot of our medicines come from the Old Rozes. Even how you heal yourself without a mage is likely because of them. I hope you had a professional surgeon work on your eye, or did a blacksmith accidentally cut out some of your brain too?”

  Markus laughed, cupping his hand over his eye to peer farther into the brightening horizon. “That’s much better, Sil. I’m happy I’m teaching how to be more ‘worldly.’”

  “No thanks to you.”

  He shrugged, unapologetically. “So what did those old dead famous family have to say about infections, anyway?”

  “That the infected come down with a slowly heating fever over a two weeks’ time characterized by nausea, cramping, vertigo, stiff joint and delirious fevers.” —Markus pointed to his head when she said ‘delirious’— “Yes, yes, that can mean they relive old memories. After the fever peaks, they pass on. Days later—

  “Minutes later more like it—”

  “Can I finish?”

  He grunted, quickening his pace.

  She quickened, too, to keep up, awkward as it was while she iced her shoulder. “Some time later, they come alive again, moving randomly, uncoordinated, but no heartbeats, no warmth. Like normal dead, they stiffen with rigor-mortis and become immobile for a time, then as normal cadavers do, the muscles relax, and they enter their most active phase. Most have to be put down when rigor-mortis makes it easier.”

  “Spoken as I expected,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Like someone whose been cooped up in a Temple her whole life.”

  “I can see too what being out in the wilds does to a man,” she said, awkwardly.

  He rolled his eye, and Sil would have too. What kind of retort was that? She could do better. “When we find Gene,” he said. “I highly encourage you not to go back to your Temple.”

  “And why not? That’s where I belong. It’s what I’m—”

  “Maybe because they sent you on this quest wholly unprepared for a reason? You know, for someone so smart, Sil, you…and the Doyenne are…,” he seemed flustered over his words.

  “I already told you not to use that title. It’s ‘Her Holiness.’ You’re not one of us, but you may continue. What were you going to say?”

  “Never mind,” he bristled. “We have to talk about our plan. Sat’r is up ahead—”

  “I see it,” Sil said, peering into the still-dark horizon, an elongated row of black blocks and huge stacks peeking above.

  “Yea, it’s Sat’r. There are two parlors there I know. Both attached to each other through the back. One facing Miller’s Street. Fancy, well-to-dos go there. We are not.” Sil felt disappointed; she’d never been to a parlor since she was five. “The other one is a rundown tavern facing Bargain’s Row. Bad place for someone like you, so—”

  “I’m not staying outside.”

  “Can I finish?”

  She nodded, approvingly.

  “You stay close to me and talk to no one. We’re going into a pool of sharks and you’re fresh meat.”

  Sil opened her mouth—

  “And, it’ll be nice if you could play up being sick. That stuff on your face is already wearing thin, and I’d rather people be afraid of you than enamored by a young woman.”

  “I am not defenseless."

  He rose an eyebrow at her wounded shoulder.

  “This was a mistake. I was trying to help you.”

  “Yea, well…about that. Thanks.”

  “What was that?”

  “I said, ‘Thank. You,’” he exclaimed.

  “You are welcome, Markus. Maybe before our adventure is over, I can save you, again.”

  “No, you won’t,” he pointed his finger at her. “No magic. No fire. No wind. No ice. Or I put the cuffs on you right here and now. The last thing I want is for you to stand out. We’re two strangers in a foreign city. I won’t be able to return the favor if there’s trouble.”

  “If it’s going to be as dangerous as you say, wouldn’t you want help—”

  “Don’t you think they’ll have runic cuffs of their own? You know how much money they could sell a mage for? A woman your age, too?”

  Sil frowned. “I don’t understand. Who might have runic cuffs?”

  “Slavers,” he whispered.”

  “Oh don’t be silly. Slavery is outlawed in the Princedoms. This isn’t your apostate Empire, where apparently even morality has gone out with the sacred.” Besides, she wasn’t some weak healer; she was skilled for warfare against the powers of darkness. The way her fire spell torched that carriage and her wind spell freed Markus was proof of it. If anyone so unlucky enough to cuff her would pay dearly the moment she was released.

  Markus buried his face in his hands. “Naivety incarnate. Just do what I say, please, so we can find Gene all the faster.”

  Sil smacked her lips, but complied, nodding her head forward.

  “Thank you. At that tavern, there’ll be someone I know. He’ll have information about where Gene’s been lately. I hope.”

  “Good,” Sil said, releasing her icing magic. She rounded her shoulder, pain still throbbing, but the swelling had gone down. If she knew healing, she would have been fully healed by now, but, as it was, she’d have to wait for her body to do it on its own.

  “With luck, she’ll still be in the city. And then it’ll be your turn to fish her out, Miss Casmarus.”

  Sil rose her chin. “Yes, I will.” I’m not going to let you slip away, sister. The days of you doing whatever you want are over.

  16

  Celeste Casmarus: Sat’r

  “Father, are people trying to hurt us?”

  “What? No. Now why would you say something like that?”

  “Because Mother keeps a knife under her pillow and you always hide a hand-cannon on you. We’re always packed up to leave. Is it because we’re not from here? Everyone looks so different than us.”

  “Almighty knows that’ll change soon…”

  “Why?”

  “Uh, no, what I mean is people are NOT going to hurt you. And you and Celeste ARE from he
re. Remember that. You’re both Ladress subjects. But your mother and I, we weren’t born here.”

  “So, you’re not safe but we are? You’re confusing me.”

  “Ha. Ha. Smart girl. But you shouldn’t be thinking about stuff like that. You should be thinking about your future. Sato’s no place for a girl with your talents.”

  “…”

  “Don’t make that face, the Golden Lady might just take your magic away from you. What about becoming a priest? Wouldn’t you like be with others who can use magic? You know, of the Seven, Ragnarok fears her the most.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she hates death, silly. Dead things have no magic in them. Listen, I’ve got a trip to Sat’r tomorrow and when I get back, you, I, your mother, and Celeste will all go to the Holy City together. OK?”

  “OK!”

  -Conversation between Genevieve Casmarus and her father.

  To say the tavern was ‘rundown’ was to say the sun was a smoldering lump of coal. The walls, though made of stone and appearing excellently laid, were chipped and gouged as if axes or shovels had attacked it. Layers of green-brown moss soaked in the soot from the smithies and leaked black grim down its side, forming dry ringed puddled on the stone curb. Boarded up windows were a foregone conclusion to a place of this reputation, but the bars that covered them, thick and crisscrossing, gave Sil an uneasy feeling that even a ‘rundown’ place like this appeared valuable to the people out on these streets.

  And Bargain’s Row held nothing that would be considered for its namesake. Buildings in similar shape to the tavern lined its thin muddy street, barely wide enough for a stagecoach. Most appeared to be living quarters for workers, but with the sounds of the rest of city coming to life in the early morning, no one here yet stirred. And that made her grateful. Except for a few sleepers huddled against buildings and doorways, the two of them seemed to be the only ones awake and moving about.

  Markus, after giving her another warning about being careful, knocked on the iron door of the tavern —rusty with hollowed corroded holes.