by Jordan Reece
What he was going to say to this man in the minutes before his death . . . This was infuriating! He had traveled hundreds of miles to unwittingly aid a criminal, and for nothing since Westen at’Inamon would soon be dead, and the pilfered goods were stuck within Elario himself.
An old man hobbled out of the alleyway with a dry, mirthless cackle, and two children were permitted in with their offering of sweet sticks. They skipped twenty paces down the alleyway and dropped to their knees at a grate, bottoms up as they thrust the sweets through the bars. When they lingered overlong, the men at the head of the alley called in to fetch them out. A man and son in threadbare scuffs went in next with figs.
Standing uncomfortably between the townsmen, Elario looked innocently to the pepper rose as they looked at him. Both looks were perfunctory, and then one nodded as the father and son emerged. Elario strolled in, restraining himself from running.
The bars of the grate were a half-moon shape, and fastened to bricks at top and bottom. He got down to his knees and peered inside. Flowers and fruit and sweets were mounded below the grate in the tiny chamber, where a figure in rumpled clothing sat pensively upon the edge of a cot. His shoulder-length, dark blond hair fell over his face, shielding his features.
Feeling the need to hurry, Elario said, “Westen at’Inamon?”
“The one and same, and I thank you for your gift,” answered a weary voice, a voice that made Elario’s heart jolt.
“It’s you,” Elario spluttered, the flower dropping to the ground from his numb fingers. “You don’t know me, but I think we have a mutual acquaintance.”
“Fascinating. And whom might that be?”
Elario lowered his voice. “Hydon Repse.”
The man looked up, the hair falling back to two bright blue eyes and proud features. It was him. Time had not aged him a day from Elario’s vision of young Hydon and the room with the map laid out on the table. Twenty years and more could not skip over a person so completely, and yet they had! He was exactly the same.
The townsmen had their backs to Elario when he checked over his shoulder. Nobody else was in line. Returning to the grate, he saw that the man had risen from the cot. He kicked aside the death-gifts and stood indignantly beneath Elario. “Do you think that this will fool me, you lack-brained, one-eyed scrub of a soldier? Do you? I am not so frightened by death or burdened by conscience that I will spill my guts into your ears. If you cannot string together the answers from the little you found in my shop, then this is your problem to bear, so let me go to the gallows in peace.”
“I am not a guard in disguise, but the fool that followed my uncle’s letter from Alming to Drouthe to deliver an unnatural item to you!” Elario hissed in equal indignation. “My entire life has been upended, and I have no confidence that it can ever be righted-”
“It’s time,” called a lazy voice from the head of the alley.
Elario inched closer to the bars. “So before you have your neck stretched to breaking, at least grant me the courtesy of telling me how I remove this . . . this eye, this weapon, whatever it is!”
He lifted the bandage to reveal his scarlet-and-golden eye.
If he had been shocked at Westen’s agelessness, it was nothing compared to the shock now in Westen’s face. Westen took a running leap to the grate, his hands wrapping around the base of the bars to heave himself up. In utter astonishment, he whispered, “Great Elequa! You have a dragon’s eye!”
Jerking down the bandage, Elario said, “I don’t care what it is! Just get it out of me!”
“It’s time!” the voice repeated. “They’re coming for him. Get in your place for the hanging.”
“Come to the graveyard afterwards,” Westen ordered as a lock was undone from the other side of the chamber door.
“What are you going to do for me from Elequa’s feast table in the afterlife?” Elario returned heatedly. “Tell me now!”
Westen let go of the bars and dropped to the floor. “The graveyard. And do not take that bandage off your face for any reason!”
Like Elario would be such a fool as to do so! Reluctantly, he stepped back from the jail grate. Red Guard entered the chamber, which caused him to pivot on his heel and depart the alley at speed. The townsmen bracing the entrance were already gone to join the eager queues crowding the square. Elario’s height gave him an advantage in the back; he had no intention of getting any closer to all of the soldiers at the tree.
A cry went up as the door to the jail opened. Westen at’Inamon was propelled outside with his upper arms in the grip of the Red Guard soldiers. His lips set, he was pushed down the steps to the cobbles. People jostled one another to make a path to the hanging tree. Children were hoisted up to see the criminal, and women threw flowers onto the cobbles at his feet. The crowd came back together once Westen and the soldiers passed by, crushing those flowers under boots.
In defiance was Westen at’Inamon going to his death. People murmured in dislike at his raised chin. In quiet shame or terror or remorse, in tears or begging, they could pity this man. But in obvious pride for what he had done, they flailed. Humility was a lesson Westen had never learned. The crowds were determined to teach it to him, the air broken by jeers and catcalls.
The insults redoubled as he was forced up the scaffold, and abated only when a Dragon of the Blood held up his hand and began to speak. The shouts sank to murmurs and hisses at the front, for they could see him, but continued in the back until they were audibly shushed.
Three pips glinted upon the soldier’s collar. By the time the crowd was fully quelled, the Dragon of the Blood was giving a recitation of Westen at’Inamon’s crimes. “-for conspiring with a gang of thieves to break into noble homes in Alencia, Ruzan, Betala, and Sequari, to help themselves unrightfully to wealth, for accepting such misbegotten wealth and offering it for sale upon a secret market, for the injuries taken by a lord who bravely attempted to protect his wife in the course of a robbery-”
The mutters swelled to furious shouts once more. “How dare you!” “You son of a dervesh, to hit a husband defending his wife!” “Hang him!” “String him up and stretch his neck!” It caught on through the audience, who chanted, “Stretch his neck! Stretch his neck! Stretch his neck!”
Elario was in despair to be drawn into this reprehensible affair. A rock was thrown to the scaffold, missing Westen by scarcely an inch and brushing the sleeve of the Red Guard beside him. The soldiers at the base of the scaffold closed in tightly, hands upon sword hilts and holstered pistols.
“-for these listed crimes, and more too numerous and outrageous to name, Westen at’Inamon, you have been sentenced to death by Captain Commander Alsey Dimmeder, who acts in the stead of the Crown King Crucien Veldar Malave, honored and revered, and Phaleros in his charge. Under the light of Elequa, do you have a last statement to spare yourself the divine wrath you are about to meet?” A red-cloaked vesper of Elequa was mounting the steps with a censer swinging from four silver chains.
“No,” Westen said flatly.
A collective gasp answered him, and a voice boomed, “Don’t be a fool to your last minute, man!”
The vesper approached Westen, who shook his head. “I make no excuses for what I have done.” His eyes went out to those who had come to watch him die. They alighted on Elario and stayed there. “Nor have I done the things of which I am accused. You may take your pound of flesh in the name of justice, but know that it was not true justice dealt here this day.”
The noose was put around his neck and tightened, a hood dropped over his head; he was moved to the right so that his feet were atop the trapdoor. The Red Guard soldiers and the vesper backed away.
This was the only person in all of Phaleros who could help Elario, and he was about to be killed. Blood rushed in Elario’s ears, blotting out the last proclamations, and then the lever was wrenched.
The trapdoor gave way, and Westen with it. Everyone flinched as the rope suddenly went taut, snapping his freefall to an abrupt end. His b
oots kicked once, twice, and stilled two paces above the cobbles.
Women screamed and men pressed their hands to their throats; the littlest children cried. The vesper prayed for several long minutes, his voice too thin and reedy to carry. When he was done, all in the square stood riveted as a blade was carried up the steps and swung to sever the rope. The limp body tumbled into the arms of soldiers, who were waiting beneath the gaping trapdoor to receive it. Dumped unceremoniously into a wheelbarrow, the remains of Westen at’Inamon were rolled away by townsmen.
The crowd dispersed down alleys and roads, through doors to the shops and homes around the square. Elario had just turned away himself when he remembered Westen’s words. Though the insanity in them could not be debated, he whirled around to see where the wheelbarrow was being taken.
There it was on a road across the square, one man walking it along and two more flanking the wheelbarrow to balance it on the uneven cobbles. Other people of Drouthe were following the still-hooded body, but all of the soldiers stayed at the tree.
Elario went after the corpse. After the voices in the square faded, all there was to be heard were the scraping footsteps and the rolling of the wheelbarrow. The vesper was among the company of mourners, swinging the censer and the breeze dispersing a cloying scent. They walked through blocks of still shuttered shops, and courtyard walls with urchins sitting solemnly atop to look at the dead body.
The graveyard was beyond the last row of homes. In a grassy field, each resting place was denoted by a panel of smooth stone inserted in a cast iron frame, the designs of which grew more elaborate as the funeral procession marched on. As the grass was thick, the wheelbarrow was often paused to be readjusted and shoved through. Westen’s hand fell over the side at a dip from crumbling soil, a townsman returning it with a grimace into the bed of the wheelbarrow.
Those for whom fancy ironwork could not be afforded were buried under simple stone spires. Older and older the spires became, bleached from the sun until the engravings were rubbed away, and some felled by weeds. Then there were only unadorned fieldstones in the grass.
Two men with shovels were resting against the trees that grew where the graveyard ended. They pried themselves from their slouch and gestured to a pile of dirt. A hole yawned behind it, the processional spreading out so that all had room to see. Rolled to the side of the grave, the wheelbarrow was tipped.
Elario winced as the body toppled into the hole and crashed into the dirt at the bottom. No casket or shroud was going to be granted to a criminal. The pair of grave-diggers commenced their work in filling the hole, shovels cutting into the mountain of soil. The last of Westen to be covered was the tailing rope from his neck.
People drifted away through the grass to visit graves. Elario pretended to do the same, taking himself closer and closer to the trees. After a glance convinced him that nobody was watching, he slipped among the trunks and hid, tucking his satchel into foliage.
Eventually, some of those in the procession returned to the road into town. The vesper gave a final swing to the censer and did likewise before the grave was fully packed. A group of children took up boisterous leaping from the tallest of the markers until an adult shouted and cuffed them. Shame-faced and sullen, they trudged into Drouthe.
What was Elario doing here? Lurking in the trees like a dervesh along the Hopcross as a dead man was put beneath soil? He pressed his fingers to the bandage over his eye. A dragon’s eye. But there were no dragons in Phaleros and had not been since ancient times. It seemed to him that a dragon’s eye belonged in a dragon’s own head, not in Elario’s!
The gravediggers slapped their shovels upon the earth to pack it firmer, and dropped a fieldstone to mark it. Shouldering the shovels, they headed away. Two women left a distant grave after the diggers passed, and then it was just Elario and one other man.
The second man was also amongst the trees. He was dressed in a one-piece set of scuffs, and they had seen a great deal of wear. His boots were caked with muck. Bald and muscled and very tall, he was in his middle years. What he was doing over there was uncertain. He had not been a part of the procession.
The gravediggers and women disappeared, and all was still. An even greater fool Elario felt for his presence just outside the graveyard. All of this had ended in disaster. His life would never resume as it had been. That life died in the moment he accepted the mud-stained package from Conton Evry at the Sixes.
A twig cracked. The second man was lumbering out of the trees to the graveyard. Straight to Westen at’Inamon’s grave, where he doubled over to sweep at the soil with his long arms.
A brief parting in the clouds gave Elario a start. The man had a small insignia of a flower on his cheek. He was a mechanical man. And a malfunctioning one. Pawing at the freshly overturned soil like a dog, he looked over to the road with regularity as he dug.
This was repulsive. Elario left his satchel in its hiding spot and exited the trees. “For the love of Elequa, what are you doing?” he demanded of the mechanical man. “Cease your dig; the man has died!”
He had startled the mechanical creation with his presence. Reeling back, two flat brown discs of eyes narrowed upon Elario. Then he returned to his excavation of the grave. Horrified, Elario stood there in silence as the soil and fieldstone were flung away. The pile of dirt took life again, the hole growing deep enough that the mechanical man had to get to his knees to continue.
A hand thrust out of the soil.
Elario shouted in aghast. The mechanical man stopped his digging to grasp that hand, which was clutching frantically at the air.
Heaved out of the soil by the mechanical man’s strength, Westen was dragged up to the grass. His first act was to rip off the hood, and his second to work at the rope embedded in his neck. The mechanical man turned over his arm, where a panel opened, and from the cavity within he withdrew a blade. Westen stilled and let the blade saw into the rope. Once it frayed halfway through, the mechanical man put away the blade and tore the rope free with his bare hands.
There was no insignia on Westen’s cheek, yet no other explanation could there be. “You are a mechanical man!” Elario gasped as Westen rubbed at his neck. They had convicted and hung a mechanical man! How, how could the soldiers have erred so? Mechanical men looked very real, yes, but they were primed to obey their orders. They did not lie. They did not steal or lead gangs of thieves. They did not act with such human-like insolence as Westen had upon the scaffold!
Unless he was also malfunctioning. That was what had happened here, some rogue piece of programming taking control and overriding proper behavior. It was the best that Elario’s mind could conjure.
Westen’s neck was undamaged, proving beyond a shadow of doubt that he was no man of flesh and blood. Brushing dirt from his clothing, he said, “Well met again, Hobbe. How fares the shop?”
“It is in pieces, sir,” the tall man responded. He dug at the pile to return the dirt to the empty grave. Westen moved aside to avoid being struck, as did Elario. As he worked, Hobbe said, “The soldiers destroyed it in their search after you were taken away. I climbed out the window and watched from the roof across the street. No one looted.”
“With the soldiers still here, they’ll be afraid to loot,” Westen replied.
“I do not have the requisite programs to allow me to understand that statement, sir.”
Westen stood with a smile, half in aggravation, half in affection. The smile was halved as well, his lips quirking at one side. “I remember, Hobbe. The consequences of drawing the eyes of the military has given the townspeople hesitation. Will the soldiers conclude that they are in league with me? They may believe the soldiers already took everything of use, so why make oneself of dangerous interest for little to no gain?”
Hobbe churned at the dirt, his fingers held together with unnatural rigidity to make them into shovels. The hood and rope went flying into the pit. “I do not think they discovered your room of mystery, as you call it, though my view was limited.”
“Then we shall have to loot the shop ourselves once darkness falls.”
“All this is well and good,” Elario said impatiently, “but what about my eye?”
A wagon appeared in the distance. Westen seized Hobbe and Elario and dragged them into the trees. Elario pulled his arm away and plunged deeper into the wooded patch to get his satchel. The wagon was going by the graveyard’s end upon his return, tow-headed children hanging over the side and exclaiming at the grave. Most of the dirt was back in it, but unpacked and minus the fieldstone.
Westen was sitting beneath an oak tree, his arms crossed behind his head, and Hobbe was mirroring his posture at another tree but with forced rigor. He had to be an older model of mechanical man. “Who is your manufacturer?” Elario asked.
He had addressed the question to Westen, but it was Hobbe who answered. “Court & Ave, Male Model #6, Laborer Class. I have received three sets of updates, two full body overhauls, for which I am extremely overdue for another, and additional programming in finer tasks as well as several personality imprints. May I inquire as to your name and occupation, sir?”
“I am Master Elario Repse-”
Westen interrupted lazily. “He’s a farm boy and petty spice-gatherer from Alming, a small town in the south of Phaleros, whose ancestors were stalwarts in the spice trade until the end of the Troubled Times. Now tell me how exactly it is you arrived here with a dragon’s eye in your head.”
It was shocking to be revealed so casually, but Westen knew Hydon, and the generations in Alming almost always took up their family’s trade. “As I said, my uncle, a man I grew up believing long dead, sent a package to Alming with this eye in a box, and a letter bidding my father to bring it to you in Drouthe. My father is dead five years, so I did this in his stead. Why did Hydon not just send it to you? What are you going to do for me?”
The last of his words were spoken in an accusatory burst, and bridged embarrassingly on a childish whine. A hint of a blush stained Elario’s cheeks, but he did not drop his eyes from Westen. This problem should never have been made his.