by Jordan Reece
He emerged from the inn a much finer man than the one who entered it. Luce and Onetto were long gone, Elario taking the same path to the Grand Market. It had to be crossed to reach the airfield, and that was no insignificant task. The street fair upon the Hopcross was tiny in comparison, just a chaotic, cluttered creek of vendors over two miles of road; the Grand Market was a sprawling sea with thousands of stalls, stands, stages, tents, tables, podiums, and curtained alleys running in all four directions.
The air was heavy with the competing smells of food and spices, incense and wine, and alive with music from hundreds of flutes, harps, fiddles, and throats. Tall, brightly colored flags jutted up everywhere, emblazoned in symbols of what could be found far below. Four banners whipped and snapped even higher to promote the carnival. The highest of all was for the Temple of Elequa, which was on the north side of the market. All of the gods and goddesses were inside, so that one might kneel and light candles when far from home. Elequa stood at the center of the temple, a stern-faced totem carved in marble and resting a hand upon the point of a stone plinth. The features were male upon one side and female on the other.
Some people knew Elario here, most especially in the herbal section, so he entered the market in a quarter that he had not previously traversed. Gamblers’ Alley was a crooked path of card and dice games, eyes sizing up Elario darkly to gauge him as mark or threat, and dismissing him when he passed by without pause. Despite the looks, this was probably the safest place in the whole of the market. Each gambling establishment, whether it was a big tent or a single, rickety table, kept tight watch on the games and winnings.
He got through it and consulted a pole prickled in guide signs. Then he crossed the meat market, where knives thumped over and over into cutting boards and carcasses hung from hooks. Blood was speckled over everything. Flies buzzed about, children snapping rags to force them to settle elsewhere, adults calling out orders to harried butchers. Live fish swam in tanks and chickens squawked in cages, Elario swerving around a protesting piglet shoved in his face by a man trying to sell it. “Only a few silvers!” the man called after him. “So small you can put him in your pocket!”
Elario wasn’t going to Drouthe with a squalling piglet in his pocket. From there he entered the quarter for fortune tellers. Ignoring their calls to read his cards and palms, interpret his dreams, and contact his ancestors for divine messages, he escaped to another sheeted alleyway and guidepost. He pressed on and on through copses of furs and jewelry, weavers and merrymakers and metalworkers, the heat and smell and ringing hammers of the forge following him into Harlots’ Paradise.
Women smiled and simpered at him with painted lips, lifting their skirts to show off shapely calves and asking what he fancied. They named their prices and begged him to step into their tents. When he showed no interest, one laughed and yelled out to the man at the end of their quarter. In naught but his smallclothes, he flexed to show off the bulging muscles in his arms and back.
Grunts and cries of abandon pierced through the thin walls of the tents. This had never appealed to Elario in the past, rolling with a stranger upon soiled sheets damp from spilled seed, and nothing had changed in him today. He preferred to visit the Greenspry, to sit at a table with his ale, play a game and befriend other Dagen’s touched, take a room on the second floor with his lovers for a night or two, be they fishers or farmhands or shopkeepers, before the demands of their lives parted them. Sex as it was offered at the Grand Market just revolted him.
The man in smallclothes moved when Elario got to him, for they were not allowed to block the path or take anyone into a tent by force. Giving Elario a wink, he said, “You’ll come back, and I’ll be here.” Elario merely nodded and stepped past to the alley. There was less of the market before him than there was behind him now.
The paths through the remaining quarters were more convoluted, and with fewer markers to guide him. He could not always see the flags above the flapping awnings of the stalls, but all he had to do was call out for the airfield, and someone inevitably pointed him ever onwards through the crooks and forks and turns.
He burst through the last line of stalls in the glassware quarter and into the horse races, countless backs to him as bettors cheered and hooves thundered. The airfield was beyond the stadium, a silvery-gray aerial dropping out of the sky to land upon it. Ten men in scuffs and gray, four-paneled hats were standing upon the trimmed field, necks craned to the aerial as ropes plummeted over the side to the grass. They dove about for the ropes until each had one. Piles of sandbags were nearby to keep the weight steady as the passengers disembarked or the cargo was unloaded.
Elario hastened down the road that ran alongside the field. The station was at its end, travelers going through the archways with luggage in hand. A carriage pulled up to the station to discharge more passengers, Elario’s step quickening lest all the tickets be bought in the moments before he got there. He was nervous at the prospect of flight, having never been higher off the ground than the trees he climbed as a boy.
Going under an archway, he proceeded into a tiled room with plain walls. Tickets were purchased through two windows, one of which had a much longer line than the other. The ticket sellers behind the glass wore the same gray, four-paneled hats, as did a man who stepped up to Elario. Briskly, he asked, “Port Treweine or Vallere, sir?”
Port Treweine was at the northern edge of the golden ring, nearly to Drouthe; Vallere was the name of one of the Great Cities, and those were both south and east of the golden ring. Unsure that he had heard correctly, Elario said, “Pardon?”
“Port Treweine or the Vallere tour?” The airfield worker gestured to the windows in turn. “The Vallere tour stops overnight in Port Galderon and rounds back here in the morning. It leaves in ten minutes.”
A shock went through Elario as the worker spoke. Stepping out from a side door was a Red Guard soldier. He stationed himself beside the longer line to Port Treweine. Hastily, Elario said, “The Vallere tour.”
He was motioned to the shorter line. The plume of black strolled along the far side of the Port Treweine line, and eventually out the archways to the airfield. Just as surprised glances were cast to the Red Guard at the entrance to Ballevue, so was this soldier receiving a few of them in the station. Whispers rippled through the longer line, heads nodding in agreement that it was time some military action was taken against the dervesh. But what precise action could be taken by a lone soldier at the airfield was beyond their kenning. It heralded greater things, those whispers hissed.
Elario made it to the window. The tour to Vallere cost half a gold. He passed his money through a hole in the glass and received a wooden ticket. The seller directed him to a side room where the Vallere passengers were queuing. Pocketing the ticket, Elario let himself in. About a hundred people were sitting upon benches and clustered at the windows to look out at the aerial that had just arrived.
He would disembark in Port Galderon this evening and catch a second aerial to Port Treweine, or take a carriage if there were none. He could even ride upon a crawler through the golden ring! Those joined cars led by a steam engine were much faster than horse-drawn carriages. Taking a seat upon an unoccupied bench, he listened to the excited conversations all around him and thought that he might not care if he had to walk and swim from Drouthe back to Alming, if it meant this box and the strange circumstances around it were gone.
An old man settled upon the bench across from Elario. Florid of face, large of belly, and with a crook in his nose, his billowing black robe fell into a puddle about his shoes. He had lost his hair, all but a horseshoe of salt-and-pepper strands and a tufted island at his crown. A wooden cane with a metal tip was clenched in his left hand.
A scholar from the golden ring, that black robe indicated. Elario had seen scholars infrequently in the Grand Market amongst the book stalls. There were universities in the north, but much like curiosity in the goings-on of court, nobility, and succession, scholars and universities were not some
thing that concerned the southern people.
Fairly beaming with good humor, the scholar regarded Elario and said, “How many of these Great Cities tours have you taken, young master?”
“This will be my first,” Elario replied.
“Your first? A shame to hear; there are better tours of better cities than Vallere.” The scholar pressed a pipe into his mouth, not to smoke but just to have it there. “Brother Shanus. Well, they can’t reach us up high, so fear not. Even the flying dervesh have no hope of reaching the aerial at the height we shall ride. And you are?”
“Ild. Ild Tappan.” If Ild was a common name, Tappan was even commoner: there were Tappans from Goat’s Peak to Ballevue to Penborough.
“Country fellow, eh?” the scholar asked. “From farther south?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Your slight accent is indicative of the Daine dwellers, and your clothes, my young master, would be considered out of date in the golden ring, though no offense is intended by my observation. Such feathers and fluff and flounces and puffs the noble children wear these days! These silly hoops on the girls’ skirts! Jangles and spangles and all trying to outdo one another to the wreckage of good taste and decency. They did not dress so ridiculously when I was growing up, thank Elequa. Are you just out for a jaunt, Master Tappan?”
“Indeed,” Elario said. “It is hard to hear of the Great Cities so often and not be curious, even just a farmer.”
“Ah, yes, I do love a curious mind. And this is the only safe way to get a look at them! Oh, but Vallere is grand for one who has never hovered above any of the cities. It is not nearly as far as some of them, like Nevenin or Atara, and the bridge stands in all its glory. You must use scope spectacles, if you don’t mind my advice! The naked eye gives you only shapes at this height; the spectacles offer details. I can mark every hair on the head of a dervesh with mine. They’ll have spectacles to borrow on the aerial, should you be short.”
That plume appeared in the doorway. The soldier gave the people within the room a passing glance. Pretending not to notice, Elario smiled to Brother Shanus. If the Red Guard was searching for a man traveling alone, then it was best to make the pretense of having a companion. “Which of the Great Cities have you seen?” he asked in forced joviality.
The cold, unfilled pipe bobbed in the scholar’s teeth. “All of them, yes, all of them! I am a curator at the Queen’s University in Alencia. My collection is the Troubled Times, the fall of the Great Cities specifically. I add my own drawings of the cities to the historical notes. Yes, but all of the noble youth plead for drawings of the dervesh, which is tiresome, eh?”
The soldier turned his back, still in the doorway but staring to the lines at the windows. “I imagine so.”
The elderly scholar nodded with enthusiasm. “All the incredible monuments of humanity’s past and they hanker after divine rubble! ‘And Elequa in rage, in rage at blood spilled in hallowed hours, Elequa stepped above to throw open the doors, the doors of the prison in the heavens, and stepped below to throw open the doors, the doors of the prison in the underworld. And raged forth the shrieking, scrabbling, clawing, twisted children of Elequa, and their children upon the earth, and upon the earth they stayed.’”
The plume vanished, and Elario relaxed. “Why did the Corpse King do that? In the ballads, it never says why he did the things that he did.”
Brows lifted with incredulity. “Teach you not any of this in the south?”
Elario shook his head. “Only what is in the lost ballads.”
“The Ballads of the Lost are beautiful works of music and verse, yes, but at times they stray into the fanciful. No matter that you do not know; you will be my student upon this tour and your ignorance remedied. I do love to teach. He was mad, my boy, as mad as they come! King Denelan the Mad was what they called him within two years of his stepping to the throne. A second son, Denelan Azar Malave of Phaleros, and mentally weak. Too weak to take his rightful place as second-in-line, which was to serve in the Dragons of the Blood from lowly ensigno up to Marchos; he was too indolent for the physical rigorousness and too slim-witted for the strategy. That the Crown saved face, he was dismissed with honors from service while still in boyhood, a younger and more competent brother inserted in his place. A story was told that young Denelan had been wounded grievously in training. The only wound was in his character. As vain as he was foolish, of a querulous and discourteous nature, his life up until the crown was spent amongst the royal homes in Phaleros, gaming and whoring, scuffling and drinking. But upon the untimely death of his older brother in a hunting mishap, the second became first. To put the scepter in such an unworthy hand as his!”
A man and a woman with two sons stepped into the room, which was growing quite packed. As the family took the last open bench, the garrulous scholar removed the pipe from his mouth and tucked it away in a fold of his robe. He thumped his cane upon the floor. Elario was not the only one listening with interest; many other spellbound faces were turned to the scholar.
“But it was put in his hand,” Brother Shanus said soberly to Elario, unaware of his wider audience, “and the crown upon his head, and he acted without the heed of any king or queen to precede him. He withheld the king’s gift to Elequa’s temples, and that was a scandal. He drained the treasury upon celebrations in his honor, dozens of grand parties and lavish ceremonies each year. He dashed it out on swelling the ranks of the Dragons of the Blood and building a fleet of ships both for air and sea to make war. But where? Sail the Northern Sea to Oluesse? That is a journey of months over very perilous water; more ships sink than make the destination, and no aerial can bear the quantity of fuel needed to get there. Even he was not so foolish as to command his new fleet to Oluesse. Instead, he chose to war with Bejeng since it was closer. Bejeng! They had no wealth or resources to add to the coffers of Phaleros!”
Now he noticed his audience, and spoke to them as if this room in the station was his class. “Who were the Bejeng people? Does anyone know?” When no one did, he supplied the answer. “Bejeng! It was a modest nation of fishers living hand to mouth upon the sea, the soil too poor to farm on the south side of the Daine mountains. They had no cities, soldiers, or centralized government. What did they do, when this mighty fleet of Phaleros appeared with booming cannons and legions of soldiers? Why, they climbed into their little fishing crafts and sailed away to hide in the Puzzle Islands, where no great ship can follow without having its hull ripped out. Then they were gone and never to return. How much gold went into building that fleet?”
He slapped his thigh in macabre amusement. The two boys had wriggled through the benches and were now sitting cross-legged at the scholar’s feet. Brother Shanus shook their hands vigorously in turn, and waved away the older boy’s offer of a copper. “I’m a scholar, not a merrymaker, dear child! You spend that on sweets and one day you’ll have a fine stomach like mine.” He patted his big belly for good measure and the boys giggled. “Now, after the king’s Bejeng campaign went sour, how much gold went into attacking the mountain tribes to the east and west? Too much! Too much, and for nothing! What point was there in attacking the Ponto of the Wyn mountains in the east? Their last attack on Phaleros was fifty years before Denelan’s time, petty raids of crops and farm animals. Illness had decimated their primitive people beyond the point of recovery since then; what need for an army to finish it? What glory in killing those two hundred souls, most of whom were too old or too young or too sick to defend themselves? And what point was there in attacking the Hethai in the west?”
Elario’s attention was already near full, but now it was in total.
“No point,” Brother Shanus concluded. “For at the sight of the legions bearing down, that barbarian tribe withdrew to their caves, and not a one was ever located. You cannot find the Hethai; you can only let them find you. Yet another campaign had failed. King Denelan was in search of a war to prove his might, but war was not in search of him. And so was the treasury frittered
away, in parties and pointless plots. He raised taxes to replace it during a ferocious drought of seven years, angering the populace, and confiscated the land of those who could not yield the kingstax. He beggared many in his intemperance. Do you see where this led?”
“He created a war with his own people,” Elario blurted.
“Yes! Ah, yes, you are indeed a farmer, one who has learned to see beneath the soil. Yes, that is precisely what the king did, if inadvertently. His mental state slipped further as time went on, like a barrel rolling down a never-ending slope. There was no chastening his temper, nor placating his suspicions, and he drank to excess from morn to night. He could bear no insult even given in jest, sniffed out insurrections where there were none, and accused both his friends and his enemies of outrageous crimes. One day he might kiss your cheek, Master Tappan, and the next behead you.” He cut his cane through the air in a sword stroke over the heads of the boys, who ducked and gasped. “This, this was what it was to live in the time of King Denelan the Mad. Truly, these were Troubled Times.”
The door to the field opened. An aerial worker beckoned to them. As the boys scampered back to their parents, Brother Shanus lifted his robe to claim a fine leather case concealed beneath the folds. He stood with it and wobbled, his cane slipping on the tiles.
Elario steadied him. “May I take your case to the aerial?”
“Most appreciated, young master.” Finding his footing, Brother Shanus straightened. Elario took the case from him. They joined the tail end of the passengers, who were throttling at the door.
“When did he become known as the Corpse King, if you would humor another question?” Elario inquired as they waited.
The scholar scolded him. “Not to humor it, Master Tappan, but take pleasure in it! These stories should never be forgotten; you carry my words to the people where you live, and enlighten them. Yes? Yes. The south needs its own university, as I always say, but the Crown refuses to allocate the money to build one!” He sniffed disagreeably. “That unfortunate name was given to King Denelan towards the end of his reign. It is the sole name to survive today with the majority I speak to from the south. From the farthest north and farthest west, too, he is only the Corpse King in those regions, but in the golden ring and to the east, he retains both names.