The grumblings became a clamoring. And now hands were reaching up to pull Lucious from his platform. When Lucious could move no farther from them, he clenched his bruised face and raised his arm to strike.
“Stop this,” Iliff shouted.
He had helped the struggling King to his seat and now straightened himself. Though Lucious remained standing on the bench, Iliff’s gaze came nearly to the same level as his adversary’s. Their eyes met across the circle. Iliff braced for a mental assault, but none came. He took a deep breath, then exhaled.
“He is right,” Iliff said at last. “Lucious is right.”
Lucious’ eyes expanded for the briefest moment before contracting again.
“I ordered the breach to save the wall, yes. But the breach would never have been necessary were the walls sound in the first place. I accept the blame for that.” He looked around. “The walls should have been stronger.”
The Assembly spoke their protests.
“Didn’t you hear him? He has confessed!” Lucious smiled sharply. “Though he pleads incompetence instead of treachery, still he has confessed. Perhaps he’s more honorable a man than I thought. But let us see.”
He turned back to Iliff. “Now that you’ve admitted to endangering us, will you stand by your eloquent words? Will you be—how did you say it?—like a leaf fallen on a swift river?”
A dreadful chill seized Iliff. But it did not come from Lucious this time. No, it came from his own understanding of what his failure meant, the full implications of it. He shivered and nodded his head. His time in the township, his time among these good people, was ended.
“No,” came the cries. “Don’t be cowed! You cannot leave!”
Iliff looked down at the King, who, still pressing the handkerchief to his mouth, implored him with sodden eyes.
“Well?” Lucious called. “What do you say?”
Iliff raised his face to Lucious. He looked long on him this time, on his sharp features, on the shape of his eyes. He recalled his encounter beneath the wall with the enemy who had stabbed him. Iliff knew then, knew with a startled certainty that the whispers he had heard over the years were true.
Lucious was half Garott.
“I say that we will build with stone this time,” Iliff answered. Then, with as much concentration as he could muster, he drove his thoughts into Lucious: And if you are even half as sincere as your words, you’ll help make this happen.
And in Lucious’ sudden blinking, Iliff saw that his message had been received.
Chapter 11
As Iliff filed out of the meeting room behind the rest of the Assembly, Lucious raked past him. Like ice in Iliff’s mind: My dwelling. Tonight.
Lucious lived in a low cottage appended to the rear of the foundry. Over the years Iliff had learned to avoid the dark lane that wound behind it. Now, as he walked over the wet cobblestones, the cottages dim on either side, Iliff questioned the wisdom of being there at night and alone. Was there even the least chance Lucious would listen to him? Speak with him? Help him? Or was he planning some sort of retribution for their confrontation?
The questions had occupied Iliff’s mind much of the day, especially as he directed the repair of the charred breach. Even his dear friend Gilpin had misread his troubled expression.
“Don’t you worry,” he said, walking over to where Iliff stood. “Come morning, it will be as sturdy as ever.”
Iliff nodded absently. He was watching the members of his crew set lengths of timber into freshly dug holes. Nearby, the brickmakers stirred troughs of mud and gravel. Iliff was unable to assist them for the deep wound he had suffered. Beneath his shirt, a dressing bound his upper arm.
“No one blames you,” Gilpin added.
Iliff turned and looked on his friend’s concerned face. There was so much trust there, even after his failure.
“They should have been stronger,” Iliff said.
“How, my friend? The walls tower over us as it is. Any stronger and we’d find ourselves prisoners inside of them.”
But at least we’d be safe, Iliff thought.
“And remember,” Gilpin said, “the Garott did not succeed.”
Not this time.
“Your walls are sturdy.”
Iliff had lived among the Fythe long enough to understand their mannerisms. Rather than voice disapproval for something being proposed, they tended to speak approvingly of what already was—as Gilpin was doing now. Word of Iliff’s declaration to build with stone had spread quickly and, as he had feared, was being received with just this air of disapproval.
It was why he needed Lucious.
“Can the missus and I expect you for dinner?” Gilpin asked.
“Hm? Oh, not tonight, my friend. I’m sorry,” Iliff said. “I’ve another engagement. A meeting.”
Now, as he neared Lucious’ door, he paused to peer about. He half-expected to find members of the militia crouched in the shadows that shrouded the sides of the building, but there was no one. Iliff stepped up to the stoop. Though the window beside the door was covered, he could make out a small halo of light beyond. He rapped on the doorframe, then stood with his hands clasped before him.
A moment later, there came the sounds of footsteps and bolts being drawn. The door cracked open.
“It’s me,” Iliff said, squinting into the door space. He could not tell whether the figure blocking out the light was Lucious.
There came a grunt, and the door opened just wide enough for Iliff to pass. The figure moved around to the backside of the door.
Iliff lowered his head and stepped inside. The room was narrow and windowless, save for the one beside the door, which was heavily curtained. A tallow candle sputtered on a table littered with dishware and parchments. Broken tools and fractured blades lay over shelves and against the walls in heavy piles. The whole room smelled of burned metal.
“I promise nothing,” Lucious said, closing the door and drawing the bolts.
Iliff started at his voice, but did not turn. He pretended to be concerned with the low-beamed ceiling as he walked the length of the room. Not until he had reached the tangled bedding at the far wall did he stop and face Lucious. He was relieved to find him still standing beside the door.
“Nor should you,” Iliff said. “At least not until you’ve listened to what I have to say.”
Lucious’ eyes glared.
“But first I ask a courtesy,” Iliff said, working to control his voice. “You may consider me in whatever light you wish out there, but while I am a guest in your home, I expect to be treated as one.”
“Oh, just get to it.”
“After all,” Iliff continued. “We are not so very different. Perhaps this is why you despise me.”
“I didn’t invite you here to—”
“Listen,” Iliff interrupted, raising his voice, “If I were to ask you your most important duty, you would say defending the township. And I would answer the same.”
“It’s what anyone would say!”
Iliff held up a finger. “But if I were to ask you what you feared most, what you honestly feared, you wouldn’t say the Garott, at least not the Garott who gather beyond our walls. In fact, you’d be wary of answering and probably wouldn’t answer at all.”
Lucious began to speak, but stopped and looked hard at Iliff.
“We are both marked, Lucious. Whether we like it or not. You have long known this of me, and now I know it of you. It doesn’t matter that we are from different places. The same dark tendencies lurk inside us both. And it’s this darkness we loathe and fear most.”
Iliff knew he was taking a great risk, not only in pointing out the darkness in Lucious, but in confessing it in himself.
“What’s this to do with the walls?” Lucious demanded.
He doesn’t deny it.
“Because if they succeed,” Iliff said, “if they thwart the enemy once and for all, the walls may yet redeem us.”
Before Lucious could speak, Iliff sat down at the
table and picked out a charcoal pencil from a spill of them and turned over a gray sheet of parchment. “May I?” he asked.
Lucious grunted.
Iliff sketched several lines. “Here are the town walls as they presently stand. Timber. Twelve feet high and six thick.” He could have drawn them in his sleep. He drew over the same lines until they were dark and coarse. “And here is what I propose. Walls of stone. Twenty feet high and ten thick.” He drew circles along its length. “And there will be more guard towers than before, cylindrical ones. No more blind spots. The gates will be larger as well, see? Two sets of doors to pass at each instead of one.”
He could feel Lucious at his back. “What about the Keep?” he asked.
“Yes, we’ll make over the Keep as well.” Iliff sketched it above the town. “As our final bastion, it must be defended best of all. There’ll be an inner wall this time, larger and stronger than the outer wall, which too will be made over in stone. Taller towers as well.”
When Iliff finished, Lucious lifted the parchment and carried it to the far side of the table. He tilted it toward the candle and squinted. From beyond the rear wall Iliff could hear the ticks and knocks of furnaces cooling in the foundry.
“Hmm, this is all rather good.” His voice was mild and distant. And for the first time Iliff was able to see traces of the King in Lucious. Yes, it was there in his stance, in the thoughtful frown of his brow. Lucious began to rest a finger against his lips, but appearing to remember his company, scowled and tightened his face.
“But there’s no offense in your design,” he said. “It’s just defend, defend, defend, cower, cower, cower.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s not enough to hold a shield to their attack.” As Lucious began to dig through a pile of parchments on the far side of the table, all semblance to the King vanished. “They must be made to suffer, to scream out and bleed. That’s what the others don’t understand.” He straightened suddenly and stared at Iliff. “Do you know why the town was nearly taken?”
Iliff felt shame color his cheeks.
Lucious’ expression softened for the briefest moment. “Yes,” he mumbled, “the breach, there was that. But did you see the King’s Guard?” he cried. “Ha! They might as well have been trees for all the good they did.”
“What do you mean?” Iliff had never heard anyone challenge the King’s Guard so.
“They were so concerned with defending the town that they ventured no counteroffensive. That’s how they’re trained.” He sneered and spoke in a lilting voice. “To defend with honor, or some such nonsense. It was not until I and others not beholden to that foolish code charged the breach that the enemy felt our righteous wrath. Our blades slashed and sang, and the enemy fled. And this from a common lot with little training.”
“You’re not suggesting that the guard be disbanded?” Iliff said.
“No, no,” Lucious said distractedly. He had resumed rifling through the parchments and now seized several of them. “This!” he said. “This is what I’m suggesting.”
He spread the drawings in front of Iliff and stood back, arms folded. Iliff leaned over them. They were plans of some kind, but they were chaotic. Scribbles mostly. He looked on them for several moments before turning back to Lucious.
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand.”
“Here!” Lucious huffed and pulled up a stool. “It’s a machine, a catapult. It can hurl stones from the towers, two hundred meters distance or more, it’s said. Do you see the arm here and the way it’s winched over here? That’s where it gets its might.” Lucious’ voice became almost giddy. “The enemy needn’t even reach our walls for us to smash them down.”
“I don’t know…” Iliff said. “I can’t imagine the King and Assembly getting behind such a project as this.”
“That’s because they don’t understand the incursion for what it was. That? That was nothing. The first of many assaults—of slaughters, if we do nothing.” He shoved himself away from the table and stood. “Who but a fool would try to keep to the old ways in the face of that?”
His footfalls paced behind Iliff, then stopped. “Listen, I can help you get your stone walls up,” he said. “But for your part, you must help me get these machines installed.”
Iliff began to shake his head.
“What? You don’t believe in destroying the enemy?”
“I believe in keeping the enemy on the outside.”
“They will not quit.”
“We don’t know that.”
Lucious strode to the door and began to draw back the bolts. “I can’t help you then.”
“Now wait—”
“You’re in charge of the walls. And whether you intend for it or not, the stance you take will manifest in them. If you’re strong of resolve, then your walls will be strong. If you’re weak…”
Iliff began to protest but stopped when he realized that Lucious’ voice held no malice. He was simply stating the truth as he saw it. Iliff looked down at the drawings. The lethal machine stood from the parchment now. He was not sure how he had missed it before.
“I know you feel it your duty to consult the King,” Lucious said. “But remember, he is ill. Don’t misunderstand me. He is my brother and I owe him much. I don’t wish to deceive him. But he will not live to see the conclusion of this war, and so ultimately it is not his to wage.”
“But there is Skye,” Iliff said. “She… her heart is as her father’s.”
“Yes, she too is gracious,” he said. “Still, she doesn’t know the enemy as we do. She will not understand that these machines are for her sake and for all those…” Lucious stopped suddenly and pressed his eyes closed. He stayed like that for a long moment, not moving. When at last his eyes opened, they glistened red. He swallowed and cleared his throat. “There is no darkness in her,” he finished.
Chapter 12
Iliff spent the next weeks petitioning the King and members of the Assembly, while Lucious used his hero’s status—and failing this, fear and guilt—to rally support among the townspeople. One by one, a majority of the Assembly members consented to the plan for stone.
But, though weak with age and illness, the King resisted.
“A part of me cannot accept that it has come to this,” he said from his bed. He had been confined to his room ever since the emergency meeting, and already there were whispers in the town of succession.
From his chair at the bedside, Iliff nodded solemnly. His gaze fell from the King’s watery eyes to the hands that lay over the coverlet. His fingers had narrowed, the skin over them thinned to a state of near translucence. Iliff felt guilty now for not having come to him first.
“I understand the need for strong walls,” the King said. “But stone is inert. There is no life in stone. My people are lovers of fields and woodland, of things grown. They need land beneath them and open skies above. They will not do well in stone.”
“But there is the enemy,” Iliff said.
The King began to cough. Iliff poured him some tea from a kettle at his bedside and helped him to sit up. When the King finished, Iliff helped settle his head back on the pillows.
“The stone is only until the enemy is thwarted,” Iliff said. “I cannot see the alternative.”
“The alternative is to maintain the walls as they are. The walls are strong without being confining. And they have thwarted the enemy. Now is the time to seek new agreement with them.”
Iliff looked at the silver band on the King’s finger. “I… I do not know the Garott as you do, Sire. But I have heard the stories. They were forced back this time, yes, but they have found a weakness in these walls. They know they can be torched. And that is my fear. That the Garott will shun talk to return in larger numbers and with more fire.”
The King smiled and looked long on Iliff. “You love my people,” he said. “I saw the seed of it when you made your pledge to me those years ago. When you pledged to help protect us and promote our well-being. But the
re is something else that compels you, Iliff. Something that I have felt in you from the beginning but that you are loath to speak of.”
Iliff felt his stomach clench. “What do you mean?”
“I have never demanded it of you. I hoped that you would tell me in your own time.”
Iliff averted his eyes. He thought of all the things he had kept hidden these years. His treachery in the prison, his time in the mines, his friendship with the creature Troll, the destruction that followed. He tried to speak but did not know where, or how, to begin. The King crawled his hand over the coverlet until he found Iliff’s hand. The firmness of his grip surprised him.
“I want you to look at yourself,” the King said, his gaze falling to Iliff’s body. “I want you to see something.”
When Iliff looked down, a charcoal mist clung to his chest. “Huh?” he exclaimed. He leaned back and wiped at it with his hand, but the mist remained, cool and unperturbed. Iliff could feel the weight of it now, the way it pulled on his shoulders and drew his head forward.
“What… what is it?”
“It is this thing you hold to,” the King said. “I’m revealing it to you. It is similar to what Lucious carries, though his has been with him longer. Indeed, it is the reason for the way he is.”
Iliff wiped at the gray several more times. “How can I be rid of it?”
“It cannot be dispersed by walls or armies. Neither can it be destroyed by machines.”
At this last remark, Iliff looked up. The King’s eyes remained neutral as he lifted his fingers to dispel the mist. Did he know of the catapults? Iliff wondered. Did he know that, as they spoke, Lucious was having them built in the back of the foundry? He had entrusted the project to a handful of his blacksmiths; and where he would need other workers, he told Iliff, he would arrange it so that each labored on a different part of the machine while remaining ignorant of the whole. Though Lucious had taught Iliff to store his thoughts in a part of the mind that was easier to hide from view, the flush of guilt now threatened his face. He looked down again. The charcoal mist was gone, but he could still feel its weight.
Lights and Shadows (The Prisoner and the Sun #2) Page 7