Roe pushed off Loyt, falling to the ground. “What…what was that,” she whispered, darting her eyes all around while straining her hearing over the heartbeats in her throat. “Was that you? What did you say?”
Loyt extended a hand —Roe flinched— and he pulled away, frowning.
“You…you did hear something, didn’t you,” she asked.
Loyt shook his head. “No, I didn’t. Araa, what’s wrong?”
She rubbed her face, massaging her cheeks and rubbing her eyes. She hadn’t sleep in a while; that must be it. Lack of sleep…or her symptoms getting worse.
Loyt extended his hand again, and this time, she took it, allowing him to help her back up, her arm over his shoulder. All the while, she scanned her surroundings, still not convinced she hallucinated those words. Don’t go back home? Don’t let him find you? Stay hidden? That didn’t make any sense.
Loyt eased her to take a step forward. “Maybe when we get to Faf’r,” he began. “You should see a mage, maybe even a surgeon. Gotta be someone—"
“No,” she said quickly, before taking in a deep breath and exhaling slowly to calm herself down. “I lied,” she said, trying to smile. “I didn’t sleep at all. That’s it. Just so tired, I’m hearing things.”
He looked at her sideways before glancing down to her bent knees. She tried shifting more of her weight off him to show how much stronger she’d gotten, but her knees threatened to buckle. “If you say so…,” he said slowly. “I guess our healers know better than some foreign-trained mage.”
“Yes, yes,” she added, trying to get him to start moving, but she noticed the expanse again. And her heart jumped. This is stupid. There’s nothing to fear.
“It’s the shortest way,” he said, probably guessing how she was feeling. “Faf’r is just on the other side of that forest. We’ll be through before you know it.” He then revealed from his pocket a small warding stone. “Don’t worry, I have this too. Chills won’t care for us. And if they come, at least we’ll be warm through the night.”
“Not very funny. What about infected wildlife?”
He placed the stone back into his pocket and reached round his back. This time, he drew out a large dagger in a brown leather sheath. He unsheathed it, revealing an almost foot long thick curved blade with a golden hilt decorated with embedded precious stones and cut in with symbols that resembled lines, curves and shades, and a red painted pommel. On the surface of the metal swam dull gray hues, showing that it had been imbued with some kind of magic in the past. Roe couldn’t tell which, but it was very valuable. Selling that, she would be able to rest in a stagecoach and hire some coachmen to get her back to the shore. They’d drop her off far enough away so her crew wouldn’t see them, and then walk the rest. Yes, she’d steal it.
“If one dares, I’ll kill it with this,” he said, with a devious grin. “Don’t see this on the Islands, huh?”
“No… I don’t.”
“Come on, I’ll tell you the story,” he said, helping her walk again. “My island, La’Khan; we’re known for our stories. Oh, and my real name is Papp; Papp La’Kane, son of Akaa’Okoo and Babb’Faff La’Khan. This blade here is why I came here.”
“You stole it? Islanders –we don’t steal.”
He laughed. “Maybe not your Island, but no, I didn’t steal it. I bought it and I want to bring it back home where it belongs.” He held out the knife in front of him as though it was a torch lighting the way, the dull gray light swimming along its metal. “Some islands like to wall themselves up. Others are too lazy to care. You’re from a fighting one, I can tell. Mine, we go and explore. This is what I found.”
“It’s been magically imbued, hasn’t it?”
“I hope so,” he replied, sheathing and hiding the blade behind him again. “Another Islander in Sat’r sold it to me.”
“Sat’r? You have that much time to go traveling the country?”
“Sat’r is closer than you think, the next city over from Faf’r,” he said with a grin. “I hate staying in one place, Araa. My island’s a small one and being out here, it’s like what a bird must feel when he learns to fly. All that sky. No water to stop him. Look around us now, look at all this room!”
She felt a wave of dizziness run through her.
He then glanced to her. “You know, people really are going to miss you back there.”
She looked away, keeping her gaze downward. “I know but…”
“You just wanted an excuse to go home, I know. You’ve been there for what, half a year? Your first time on the continent?”
“Yea…”
“It’s not a big deal,” he said. “I got homesick too, my first time out. But it was very nice of the Major to let you leave, let you go home”
“Yea…” He’ll probably be court-martialed, or more likely, executed once she relays what she found to Cyne. Siga Ladress, what would he do? That didn’t matter! Saving her own country is what mattered. “You won’t say anything, would you,” she found herself asking.
“About the Major letting you go? No, I won’t. They’ll go poking through my papers if I did and my forgeries aren’t perfect. …Still, I overheard it, so others must know he let you go, so…”
“He’ll get into trouble.”
“You’re nothing to them, Araa,” he said, suddenly defiant. “We are, I mean. A curiosity, an odd-grape they like to have around. Trust me, the Major will be fine, and in a week or two they’ll forget all about you. Another Islander will come, and it’ll be like you were never there.” Papp seemed to be talking from experience. Maybe he was right. They’d forget all about ‘Araa’ and the Major would be busy preparing for whatever response from the emperor. He wouldn’t be executed; Prince Landrie would need him. Still, Roe felt unsettled in her stomach, or maybe that was still the effects of her exposure. Yes, that was it.
“About my story,” he began with his chin up and chest out, forcing Roe to stretch out her legs to keep them on the ground. “The Great Islander Nation! Well, it wasn’t called that, we were all slaves once to this ancient nation of—"
“Papp,” Roe whispered. “I’m not feeling so well. Can’t we walk in silence for a while.”
He shrunk down, letting her lean a bit more on him. “Sure, Araa. Look, we’re making it through plain quickly.”
But she didn’t look. Instead, she kept her eyes down, trying her best to maneuver around rocks and struggling dry plant growth.
No, she couldn’t fool herself. Josie taught her better than that. Once she completed this mission —once Siga found out— everyone would know she was sent by the apostate emperor, especially the Major. He’d be killed because of her, executed. She couldn’t see any other way. So much for a perfect mission.
***
Ed had risen in the early pre-dawn, feeling refreshed from a full night’s sleep. He couldn’t explain it, but he felt at ease with himself. Glen had taken the brunt of the Araa controversy, holed up in Central Office coordinating the investigation while dealing with the mob. That man’s stress would probably cut years off his life for what Ed did, but it was the right thing to do, the right thing for everyone. Ed was sure of it, as he hiked up the piedmont of the Three Ridge Mountains, jogging along his familiar path in the dark dawn.
He had stopped at the Seer’s Mount for a moment, out of breath with cold breeze freezing him in his damp sweaty clothes. The view gave him a perspective of the growing city few saw. The roads lit by oil lamps promised a vigilant city, while the proud smoke rising from chimneys proved her people’s industry, and the soft sound of city life –horse’s neighing, mills grinding, carriage wheels crunching— foretold a glorious future of a citadel that would never sleep. Another ‘Holy City,’ but instead of a sanctuary from war, Ruby City would become the workhorse of war, with the Beast at its heart. Ruby City, the future hope out of Sig’s shadow. This was exactly where he was meant to be, a part of the reunification of the Ladress Kingdom. One day, he would be the one charging across the Ladress Gorge to
fight the Empire. One day, he would be the one to demand from Sera why she had disappeared to join the wrong side.
Once he had returned from his jog, Ed refreshed himself, and after visiting the mess hall for coffee, he now sat in his study, reviewing the day’s objectives. Their plans were gearing up and soon the busiest part of their overarching goal would begin. The Chronicles had all been debriefed, and the dismantlers were ready to cut into the Mountain Beast. Upon success of the prototypes, mass production would begin —the real challenge. Soldiers weren’t meant for such work and with the needed manpower, maintaining secrecy would become a even greater challenge. But that assuming the prototypes work, an unfortunately big assumption for anything other than a steam-driver.
The intelligence of the Chronicler Corps hadn’t been very good. The Brothers’ War ended too quickly; few of the Chroniclers were able to snap into memory the Empire’s range of machines, and Sig’s reluctance to have memorizers in his ranks made espionage difficult. But thanks to his unit’s work in the Ladress Gorge, they had a fully functional steam-driver to study, even if it was only for a few days.
So it was decided, the first machine of war to be tried would be an heavy-armor steam-driver made to be slightly larger than the Empire’s own, capable of running through barricades with a compliment of fifteen soldiers.
Simple steam powered technology was readily available with the Prince’s means, but not efficient. Reinforcing the boiler system with Beast material meant a hotter fire, less stressing of the metal, and more output power. The outside, too, had to be plated with that red and black material. Otherwise, the entire ‘horseless carriage’ would be vulnerable to mage attacks, and plating the steam-drivers with runic would only turn it into a furnace of hell for all inside. The biggest issues were isolating the material’s affects and distance: different pieces of the Beast seemed to exhibit different properties under different stimulus. Some pieces —the easiest to work with— were reasonably malleable while durable to physical attacks. Other pieces reflected magic while others acted more like runics, absorbing the magic and converting it to heat. Ed hoped Captain Mariam Marabaunze could find a suitable advantage for them. Still others floated, changed shape, heated, or cooled and a variety of other effects some useful, others not, and still others left up to Marabaunze and her team to decide.
The other issue was distance. Once cut, the chunks of the raw material had to dragged –with quiet some difficulty— far enough from the Beast so that it became inert and safe to mold without a runic suit. Expensive, heavy, and hard to walk in, runic suits would make full-production of the war machines impossibly inefficient. But if Sig figured it out, so could they.
Ed sipped his coffee, glancing outside. His soldiers were all lined up in the morning overcast, a cold drizzle descending on all of them with a hint of a winter. In a week, Lord Mionzeg Roz planned to inspect the project on behalf of the Prince. It had to be ready. It will be ready. Ed curled his fists. They had to be ready for production before the ground froze. Next spring –next thaw—the Landrie war machine had to be up and running and on the first day of summer, on the eve of Sig’s invasion, war with the Empire would begin. That made Ed smile. “Sera,” he said. “You picked the wrong side.”
Across the staging ground, the gate opened and in came Glen, just as disheveled as yesterday with papers in his hand and a bottle under his arm. One of the gate-guards, Olek, was talking to him for a moment before Glen through up his free arm and stormed off. Ed would have laughed —soldiers made it a point to make anyone’s life from Central Office a little difficult— but he dreaded to know why Glen had come.
The Central Office had taken over the investigation, and Ed’s own contacts told him Araa still hadn’t been found. That news gladdened him, but it also meant Predt might take a heavy fall. Ed nodded to himself. “I have to convince Glen to pardon him,” he said, watching Glen frantically march across the staging ground, making sure to interrupt as much of the morning exercises and drills as he could. He knew what he was doing, of course, but he either didn’t care or was repaying Olek’s inconvenience.
Soon, Glen made it to Ed’s door, and with a series of knocks, he shouted. “Ed, wake up. We have to talk.”
Ed opened the door. “I’m already awake.”
Glen eyed him. “Can’t sleep either, huh?”
Ed waved him in, leading him back to the same seat in his study as yesterday. “Go ahead, sit down.”
Glen plopped down on a seat, scrunching his papers behind him and the seat before opening his bottle right away.
“Want a glass?”
“No,” he said, taking a swig.
Ed sipped his coffee, leaning against his desk. “So... is this morning a good morning?”
“Not in the slightest,” Glen sighed, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “They have me running around and doing everything. Your guys are pretty cooperative so, thanks.”
“Thank Araa,” he replied. “She’s made quiet an impression on them.”
“On everyone…,” Glen added with a frown, resting his gaze on his bottle. He seemed so exhausted, Ed wanted to apologize to him. Even if letting Araa go was the right thing to do, Glen had to suffer for it. His skin appeared more yellow than usual, clammy with his beard unkempt, showing signs of constant twirling and pulling while his eyes were veiny with bags under them. Burning his candle on both ends, indeed.
“What can I do for you, Glen?”
Glen jerked out his daze, pulled one of his papers out from behind him and reached over to lay it on Ed’s desk. “Interview for you, tomorrow. About when you visited Araa the night before she left.”
Ed nodded. “I’ll be there if I have time—”
“No excuses,” Glen bristled, taking another drink. “This is going all the way up to Landrie himself.” Ed straightened off the desk. “They want her body …no excuses.” Glen leaned back into to the chair and rubbed his closed eyelids. “Oh, what a mess this is. And Predt. That ornery bastard is yelling up and down that he didn’t do anything.”
“He didn’t.”
“I don’t know that,” Glen snapped back. “With her popularity, half the people here would have let her out even if she was death himself.”
“Predt wouldn’t do that,” Ed let his voice grow hard. “You know that, and he needs to know your guys aren’t trying to pull one over him.”
Glen snickered. “Bastard needs to cooperate; that’s what he needs to do.”
“What will to happen to him?”
“I don’t know,” Glen said, shaking his head. “I just don’t know. No one wants to convict him, but if I have nothing else, I can’t just ignore that he slept on duty when she vanished. I have to deliver on the facts.”
“Well, if you do have to convict him, maybe you can pardon him too. He’s sacrificed a lot to our country, the Prince—"
Glen bellowed out a laugh. “Right! And you think those lords and ladies would care about his service? Yea, they ‘care;’ just like how they cared about Ninn’s body.”
“Predt is not a foreigner,” Ed said, failing to restrain his voice. “The man spent his entire life serving the prince. That must count.”
“I know, I know,” Glen said with an exhausted sigh. “But, someone’s head has to roll for this. And I’m only one member here, Ed, and still a Junior Magistrate for Beast’s sake. My pull isn’t that great.”
“Wait, what are you saying? You’re not the one on this case? Who is?”
Glen hung his head. “I shouldn’t even be telling you this since you’re one of the witnesses. Now that the Prince and his orbiters are looking hard on this, Julius, Reere, and Vernice want a piece, so we split up the duties and gave each other votes. I’m now in charge of the investigation only. If Predt faces one of us, it will be Magistrate Julius who will decide the sentencing—”
“No, Jules will just want to execute the man and be done with it. He doesn’t care about mitigating facts.”
Glen snorted; he knew Ed was rig
ht. Jules was the kind of Magistrate who cared about the letter of the law more than anything. Laziness, Glen thought; moral cowardice, Ed would argue. Glen took another drink and shrugged. “Like I said, someone’s head has to roll for this.”
Ed pointed at Glen, demanding, “Predt won’t be hung for falling asleep.”
Glen rolled his eyes, shrugging again. “There’s nothing I can do. If we find Araa’s body far from any town, then maybe, maybe I can get Vernice and Reere to vote against Jules…but…I…I just don’t know.”
Ed turned around, feeling his arms tense up with aggression. He wanted to punch something, anything that couldn’t break; he hadn’t drunk any alcohol in years but that pent up angst was still there. “Damn it. Predt doesn’t deserve this. It was my fault, Glen, mine.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“I put him there. I gave him that station.”
“And he should have fulfilled his duty and not fallen asleep.”
“Araa had to have walked out the back, didn’t she? Isn’t that what you told me? He wouldn’t even had seen her if he was awake.”
“Again, Major, you know that’s not how it works.”
Ed punched the wall, snapping a support beam in half, and shattering the plaster onto the ground, forming a jagged hole into small nook-sized library. He cursed under his breath.
Glen stood. “I…I’m sorry, Ed.”
“Can I see him? Predt?”
“I wish you could,” Glen said. “Knock some sense into him instead of that wall, but, no, sorry; can’t have you sharing your stories.” Ed closed his eyes, reminding himself of that passage from his favorite book. Control, he can choose to keep it. He took in a deep breath, relaxing his fists. “I,” Glen began again. “I... better go. I won’t be by tomorrow.” Ed heard Glen slap the desk. “Read through these questions and come by the Central Office.” And then he left, without another word.
Ed stared at the broken wall, cracked spiderwebs of beige paint and plaster around the gapping hole. The bookcase on the other side had tipped over too, his books making a mess on floor. He whispered himself, “Don’t give away your control,” as he balled one fist into the other. This was his mess; he had to save Predt somehow.
Call of the Chosen- Broken Kingdoms Page 44