The King's Blood

by S. E. Zbasnik

  Aldrin wanted to reach out and touch it. He'd been intrigued as a child by not only Dwarven skills, but their history, their culture, their love of eating rocks. But because the great miners all vanished deep into their underground lairs centuries ago most of what is told was actually made up by a very nice man who needed to stop licking rocks he found by the side of the stream.

  There were still remnants, pieces that would float into bazaars and market places. Fantastical machines full of gears that, when cranked, tended to do nothing. Gemstones the size of fists that sparkled made the perfect paperweight or present for that hard to buy for person. And all stamped with the hammer. He was only six when he discovered a small screw, little bigger than his own small finger, with a microscopic hammer etched into the head and excitedly shown it to Henrik. His brother grabbed it from his hand and threw it down the midden.

  His finger glanced across the gemstone's surface and the small flame leapt out, reaching for his hand. Aldrin jerked back and the only bit of light puffed up into the air, its life lost in the darkness. He could feel the icy witch glare on his burning ears even in the blackness.

  Ciara's voice rang from further down the hall, "Would you two stop playing. We're almost out of here. Just get to the door and..."

  She screamed as an icy hand grabbed her wrist and turned her arm back upon itself. Aldrin ran towards the sound uncertain what he would face, as his fingers fumbled for his rusty sword.

  A ring of flame flared into life as one of the brothers unshielded his lantern and dropped it into the oil trough. The foyer illuminated five of the nondescript brothers who'd filtered around the edges of their life, each holding various terrifying surgery tools. One even had the same mechanism Balm used to unstick the library door.

  "I'm afraid you will not be reaching the door."

  Aldrin turned, pointing his sword at the man who held Ciara tightly, the Bishop. Isa hissed like a cat, but did little else. Witches tended to skip combat training. All of the priestly eyes turned to Aldrin who wavered a moment, the sword almost slipping from his sweaty palms. He raised it to Bezoar, who barely took notice of the blade inches from his throat.

  "Come, we can handle this like civilized beings," the words oozed from his mouth. His hair, brushed up and back in a hurry, appeared like a pair of horns tufting from the sides.

  "Let her go," Aldrin said. It was all he could say as it was all he could think at the moment.

  The Bishop turned his head, "Very well." His vice released its prey and pushed her. Ciara's hand dropped and found the familiar pommel. She turned, bringing it to the Bishop's throat but he'd been expecting the feisty one to fight back and, curling his fist, punched her swiveling face in the jaw.

  The dagger fell to the ground and she crumpled after it, cracking her nose and forehead against the rocks. A small pool of blood dribbled into the masonry cracks.

  "Cia," Aldrin squeaked. She didn't answer him, but kept breathing raggedly. He hadn't killed her, yet.

  "What do you want?" Isa asked, growing restless. Her fingers were pricking.

  "Finally, someone rises to the occasion. A woman whose blood reeks of fish, but a start nonetheless." The Bishop's remarks earned a fist raise from Isa but he placed a boot upon Ciara's hip and ground down. As the girl struggled to not scream, the witch dropped her hand, letting the magical streams dribble out.

  "You travel in interesting company," the Bishop said, "A sandworm and fuel for the pyre. I'd have expected better from the prince of Ostero."

  Aldrin didn't even blink, "What are you speaking of?"

  The Bishop folded his arms, "Come now. Pretending is beneath someone of your bloodline. The swooping nose, the indented forehead, the curve of the ice grey eyes. Your veins are thick with Ostero blood."

  Great. Out of all the monasteries they had to walk into, this one was ruled by a phrenologist with a royalty fetish. "I'd quite like to keep my blood where it is," Aldrin said staring steadily up at the Bishop.

  He clucked his tongue, as if he were reprimanding a poorly performing student, "We will not be draining you," he looked down at the girl under his boot, "unless you give us probable cause."

  The blue robes advanced a step. "Word has already been sent for the bounty."

  A voice rose from the floor, full of rage, "You're for the Empire? Bastard."

  The Bastard looked down at his handy work trying to crawl away and tsked his tongue again, "You really should train your servants better, milord." He even bowed deeply, putting more pressure on Ciara.

  Aldrin instinctively stepped closer, pulling the ring of armed priests with him. "This monastery would be crushed under the Emperor's thumb without the Ostero protection," Aldrin said, lessons on the fragile politics of the region floating into his brain. He didn't add the second half of his lesson aloud, "And ye'd be up a bum fuck creek without a paddle."

  The Bishop stepped over Ciara, who breathed into creaking ribs as her hand snaked out to find the edge of her dagger. The blade bit into her finger as she inched it close and clutched it to her chest.

  Bezoar leaned into Aldrin, placing his full weight of years of ordering men to oversee the deaths of countless patrons into his words, "Your death is worth months of food, years of fuel, and salvation for many men who can have a much greater impact upon the world than you could ever dream."

  Aldrin gulped, his eyes shifting down to Ciara who was trying to climb up to her feet.

  "Bind their hands and lock them up in the room," Bezoar said sharply to his men.

  A practiced hand grabbed Aldrin's wrists and wrapped a string of catgut around them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A cowed prince paced back and forth through the makeshift jail cell which, under normal circumstances, would more colloquially be referred to as the laundry room. Every circle of the perimeter he'd kick his royal boots hard against a washtub.

  "Ah!" Ciara cried out from one of the few chairs in the stone pit stinking with lye.

  "If you would refrain from fussing, I wouldn't poke you," Isa responded, a needle poised above Ciara's eyebrows.

  "If you were a better witch, I wouldn't have to fuss," the patient responded, but held still as another suture joined the other three in her forehead. It was going to leave a scar, no doubt about it.

  "And if you were a better warrior of the Dunes we would not be in this situation in the first place."

  The dark eyes swung up into the edges of the cool witch's focused on the split epidermal before her. "Yes, you did some amazing magic back there. It's a wonder those goat fornicators could survive all that nothing of yours."

  "Enough," Aldrin sighed. They'd been arguing since the priests dumped them in the laundry room, tried to seal the door, remembered the lock rusted off decades ago, argued for about thirty minutes whose fault it was, and then jammed a wedge under it in the meantime.

  Once they left, it took Isa only a few seconds to unbind her hands. She released Aldrin first, who rose to his feet to rush to the sandworm's side, simpering over her like a wet puppy. As Isa held her hand above the still mouth checking for breath, Ciara's eyes rolled open and the most creative string of curses dribbled from her mouth. Some even the witch had never heard. The witch began to get her into fighting shape while Aldrin took stock of their surroundings, which mostly amounted to him wandering aimlessly about the room.

  Isa closed off the stitch and cut the catgut before looking up at their cause of imprisonment, "And have you discovered anything useful?"

  "We're in the laundry."

  Isa rubbed her weary temples, "Perhaps useful means something else in Ostero."

  "He means," Ciara started, her fingers stupidly probing her broken nose and the fresh bump on the bridge, "eventually they'll have to come down here. That's our chance."

  Aldrin had been eerily calm for Aldrin. Ciara'd been expecting screams, moans, or at best his near attachment to her hand. But, aside from asking her if she was all right about thirty times, he kept his panics quietly to himsel
f. The prince glanced gratefully at her, but she already tipped her head back trying to stem off the last dribble of blood. Her face was going to be a right mess in the morning. Assuming they ever saw morning.

  "Oh yes, a well thought out plan. Worthy of the great General Adrian himself. Because no man in the history of Arda has gone more than a day without needing freshly laundered socks," the witch's minuscule features cut razor sharp with her sarcasm.

  "Wha' your bid plan den?" Ciara asked, as she held a mostly clean rag up to her tender nose.

  Isa folded her arms, not enjoying the scrutiny of two teenagers who barely had enough mental power to run a pinwheel. "We fight our way out."

  The rag dropped into Ciara's lap as her head snapped down to glare upon the witch, "Oh yes? We fight our way out, through armed guards with only a needle and your glowing rock?"

  "You're correct, it is a stupid plan. It would require you to be competent at anything other than falling."

  Ciara's battered face invaded the witch's personal space, "Thus sayith the witch with the rock."

  "This is getting us nowhere," Aldrin interrupted again, afraid if it went any further he'd be left to mop up the blood. "Besides, it is not as if we won't have a few days."

  "What makes you think that?" Ciara asked, breaking away from Isa who counted that as a victory.

  "We must," Aldrin said, his mind already backing down from his hypothesis, "The sword of the Empire couldn't possibly arrive for..."

  His final word was cut off at the reverberating thud when something bounced very hard into something even harder. The three fell silent, heads turning upwards toward the sound. Aldrin counted his breath, one, two, th...

  THUD! Thud!

  A pair broke against the dam, in rapid succession.

  Ciara took in the laundry room for the first time since the blood haze cleared from her. It wasn't much larger than their cell of a bedroom, and what space wasn't taken up by lime scaled washbasins was ruled by bags of used bandages and filthy blue robes.

  "There's a pair of long paddles in the corner two of us could use to knock a few out. And if we disguise ourselves with the robes, Isa might be able to..." her voice trailed off as she turned to the witch whose eyes glowed an unnatural blue.

  Her teeth were going to town on magical fingernails, chewing nubs almost to the quick and for the first time showing real fear. But it was a panic so raw it was as if the men come to burn her at the stake were right in the room.

  "Isa..." Ciara waved her hand in front of the terrorized stare, "hello...WITCH!" The spell broke and the gnawed hand fell to her lap. Clear white eyes focused on Ciara, venom curling her lip. "What in Arda was that?"

  Isa sighed theatrically, "You would not understand."

  "Try me."

  "I'd rather not," Isa said honestly, but the dark glare wasn't letting up easily. "Very well. If you must know, the m..."

  Footsteps thundered down the staircase above them and a voice from outside their prison rose to a lilting panic, "You have to go. Both of you! Didn't you hear at the gates? MONSTERS!"

  Their guards, used to long nights ignoring patients instead of prisoners, mumbled something half-heartedly back. It was impenetrable through the door.

  But the new priest responded, "No, he ordered all of you. It's an emergency," the voice seemed to be thinking, "It's a 911!"

  Their guards dropped the surgical equipment they'd been holding, metal clanks echoing back to the sound of retreating footsteps. Only one, the cooler head in the situation, ordered this new priest to take up arms and watch the prisoners until the rest got back. Then he seemed to flee with his brethren after the monsters who needed medical assistance.

  The three prisoners glanced at each other. "This is our chance," Ciara whispered, "only one guard and he sounds buggered out of his mind."

  Isa wandered back and picked up the wash paddle, for the first time showing any signs of competency. Ciara unearthed her hidden dagger, which actually earned a momentary nod of approval from the witch.

  Only Aldrin pointed out the problem with their plan, "But how are we going to get through the door?"

  In response, a scrabbling noise and smaller thumps came from their last route to freedom as if a fabric shoe was lightly tapping against the door. Ciara tried to raise her bloody eyebrow but was only rewarded with a headache.

  "Is he trying to seal us in more?" Aldrin mouthed to her.

  As one, the prisoners advanced, their weapons raised and prepared to beat against the door with their combined might. But, the toe kept kicking, reverberating the doorframe and shaking rusted hinges. Isa pointed to it and mimicked knocking the hinges off. As she raised her paddle high, about to swing hard at the dusting metal, the door swung open on its own. A blue robe stood before them, calmly taking in a dagger and washbasin being waved menacingly at his midsection, while a stick was about to bash his brains in.

  "I've come to get you out of here."

  "He's lying," Isa responded, swinging her paddle down. But the blue robe stepped back in time easily, decades of laundry past smashing into the molding floors.

  "Wait," Aldrin said, holding up his hand.

  Ciara rocked back on her feet but kept her dagger out. For once, she was in agreement with Isadora and felt wrong about it.

  "Never trust a priest," Isa responded, glaring upon their hero, who smiled beatifically back.

  "And never listen to a witch," he answered, the smile twitching on the edges.

  Aldrin nodded his head slowly as realization hit, "I know you. You tried to poison me. Brother Tincture."

  The brother flinched, but not from the accusation of light murder. "I am Kynton. The Brother you mentioned is long dead."

  "Not yet, but give me a moment..." Isa started, raising her weapon and glaring like a wolf eyeing a corpulent deer.

  Kynton raised his arms in a desperate plea to the Prince his boss planned to sell to the only bidder. "You could kill me, fumble through a maze of long dead walls and rooms, and wind up right back where you started from. Or, you could do the smart thing and follow me though a hidden escape passage long forgotten by most the other brothers here."

  "What do you want in exchange?" Ciara asked, knowing a horse that never visited the dentist when she saw one.

  Kynton laughed, a small jumping cadence of giggles as if there weren't a single important thing in all the world, "Simple. You take me with you."

  "To Ostero?" Aldrin asked, beginning to understand what a drag the ability to grant royal favors could be.

  "Ostero, Magton, the icy castle of the Winter Lady. I'll go wherever that doesn't stink of pus, death, and repression."

  "So, not Ostero then."

  The priest stared into the princely depths, as serious as a clouded sunrise, and broke into even greater peels of laughter. Aldrin looked to Ciara. There wasn't much choice; story of their lives anymore. "What's one more lunatic trailing behind us?" she said to the king.

  Kynton's laughter slowed, "Then we have a deal?" His face appeared almost as youthful as Aldrin's at the bright prospect of his own freedom.

  "You cannot be serious? A priest who tried to kill you?" Isa stammered, seeming to be a hair's breadth from stamping her foot and running off to her room.

  Aldrin shrugged. Trying to kill him seemed to be a major past time in Arda anymore. The witch threw her paddle to the floor and glared at Ciara, "And you expect to keep this child with a death wish alive long enough to take the throne?"

  At that she shrugged, the pain in her hip screaming through her side. If they were to be betrayed, at least he'd get them further out of the laundry room. "Very well, Brother," Ciara said, catching the bemused smile of a man who hadn't spoken to a member of the curvier sex in half his life, "get us out of here and we'll get you out of here."

  "All right!" he skipped back, like a puppy let off its lead, "I grabbed your gear," he dolled out their packs, "figured we'd need it for all that adventuring and stuff."

  Aldrin looked down at the pack
tossed into his hand, as heavy as when it'd been ripped from his shoulders. Ciara rubbed her forehead, which was still sprouting a nice sheen of moisture. Anyone who called it "adventuring" couldn't be trusted to make it more than two steps out his door.

  The witch snarled at the man in blue, but accepted her own stuff still overfilled with things she nicked from the priests. If she felt she could safely carry more, she'd have taken the robes off their backs on principle alone. Her trusty walking stick was a welcome companion to the scorned laundry paddle.

  Kynton oversaw his contribution to the effort and smiled again. Rubbing his hands together, he looked at the Prince and asked earnestly, "Now what?"

  A small giggle grabbed Ciara's throat as she watched the boy flounder under this new leadership. Isa rolled her eyes, because it kept her from gouging out the priest's. Aldrin looked upon the man's chapped hands, still greedily rubbing together.

  "Take us to this secret passage," he said in his best future king voice.

  "Oh right, it's this way. I think," Kynton said, fleeing down the corridor, his blue slippers leaving no sound down the echoing stone hallway.

  One by one, the three followed suit, Aldrin for once in the lead.

  Heavy fogs rarely lifted from the dead city, having long ago found a content place amongst the crumbling infrastructure of the home to a dying god. It wasn't easy out there for a fog, devoted to its family and water vapor friends. It's not as though it could settle down in one of those quaint cottages with a trellis at the end of a cobblestone road. And who thinks of a fog vacationing at a beach in the height of summer?

  No, the only sensible place to put down tendrils was in cemeteries, long abandoned warehouses, noir docks full of unsavory characters, and dying cities. And the fog was quite happy these past hundred or so years, watching the few humans scurry into its depths but never leave, until now.

  The moaning kept it up all hours of the day, and the shuffling through its not quite corporeal body was rather disturbing to think upon. Truly, the neighborhood was going to shit.