“Answer me!” Sitrell snapped.
Yuiv hugged his knees to his chest, hiding his face and muttering in a muffled tone. “I’as don’t wanna talk bout it.”
“Oh, so now you don’t want to talk?”
The boy said nothing.
Sitrell’s rage boiled over and he shouted “You will answer me!” He shot out his shackled hands and seized Yuiv by the front of his dirty tunic and roughly drew him in. That’s when he got his first clear view of the boy’s face. Sitrell’s anger evaporated and he froze, entirely unable to breathe.
Kyen!
His face was smudged with dirt and his hair was longer, but that face―it looked just like Kyen’s.
Yuiv blurted out, “I didit, ok! I stoled yer key an helped that pig opened the gate! It’as all my fault!”
He pulled away from Sitrell’s slackened grip and scooted into the back right corner of the cell, face turned toward the wall, his shoulders shaking as he sobbed.
Sitrell sat, staring dumbfounded at Yuiv. Feeling foolish, he tried to rekindle his anger by reminding himself that this was not Kyen, but a filthy little thief who had betrayed his country and likely caused the deaths of thousands of Amigus citizens, but it didn’t work. Too much heart-wrenching guilt had doused the flames of his rage. He finally shook his head and whispered, “It doesn’t matter now.”
Sitrell waited as Yuiv’s sobbing waned before offering, “I’m Sitrell Trauel.”
“I knowed” Yuiv sniffed.
Sitrell nodded, “Yes, I suppose you do.” He paused for a moment before asking, “Yuiv, right?”
The boy nodded.
“Do you have any family?”
Yuiv shook his head.
“Do you have a home, or someone you stay with?”
Yuiv slowly scooted out of his corner. “I useda lived at the orphan home, from time I’as a baby. But I ranned away when I’as ten. Been staying where’er the hay’s warm since.”
“I’m sorry.”
Yuiv laughed. “Sorry? Why ya sorry? I’as been my’d own man four years now. I’as not sorry. I likes it.”
Sitrell didn’t smile. Alone at ten years old? He pictured Kyen’s lifeless body floating upside down in the water. He’d been alone on that day; Sitrell had left him alone. He heard Yuiv raise his voice as he repeated a question he hadn’t registered.
“What?”
“I say’d, where’as you come’d from?”
“I was born in Jyr, but my family moved to Salatia Taeo when I was a baby.”
Yuiv’s face lit up. “The capitol? Only rich peoples live there!”
To his surprise, Sitrell found himself chuckling, the sound of which startled him. It was a thing he hadn’t heard for months, and he almost didn’t recognize the laughter as his. “Not everyone in Salatia Taeo is wealthy.”
“Whaz bout you?”
Sitrell hesitated for a long moment before explaining, “I come from a family of lesser nobles, and so I guess you could say we are well off.”
Yuiv grinned. “I’as knewed it!” He excitedly moved to sit cross legged, his whole body now facing Sitrell. “So’s your papa a lord?”
Sitrell’s mirth died at the mention of his father, and he dropped his eyes to a stray piece of straw lying beneath his right boot. “My father’s dead” he whispered. “He was killed fighting the Aukasian army a few months ago.” His gaze fell on a rectangular silver badge pinned to the left side of his breast, a badge embossed with the image of an eagle in flight. “He was a soldier, like me.”
“Ya miss em a lot, don’t’chu?”
Sitrell nodded, a bit surprised as similar questions when posed by lifelong friends, ecclesiastical leaders, and loved ones usually triggered his practiced emotional detachment. Not so with this total stranger. The numbness was gone now replaced by a vice-like grief crushing his heart. He had to get it out or it would kill him. “It’s like a nightmare that I can’t wake up from,” he heard himself say in a trembling voice. “He was always there and I guess I never thought that would change. Everyone tells me his soul still lives, but…” He let it hang.
“You know’d Trysta Jiann?”
Sitrell studied Yuiv for a long moment before answering with a nod.
“When I’as at the orphan home, matron made us go to church. Priest talked bout bein good so when we’s die, we’s could go to Trysta Jiann, the crystal star.” The boy earnestly met Sitrell’s eyes. “Yer papa’s there.”
Sitrell longed for the time when he could accept that. It brought him some comfort when Kyen died, but now he knew the truth. His father had been wrong. There was no such thing as providence, just luck and coincidence.
Apparently Yuiv took his silence for acquiescence, because the continued on, “Priest also say’d that people who’d lied, cheat, and stole’d go to the Void.” Yuiv shook his head. “I’as not goin to heaven, is I?”
“Maybe you should pray and ask the Creator for mercy.” It felt a trite thing to say, but it was all he could muster.
To his complete surprise, Yuiv stood, walked to the back wall of the cell and stared up at a portion of night sky visible through a small barred window. “Creator, I’as Yuiv,” the boy prayed as he stared at a pinprick of light that was supposedly the Crystal Star. “I done’d lotsa bad stuff, but I’as don’t wanna die. I’as gonna be good if you saves me. No more stealin, or lyan, or puttin rats in noble’s carriages…”
Sitrell couldn’t help but smile at that. He and Kyen had done something similar when once a puffed up lord from the Amigus Ruling Council had come to their house seeking an audience with his father.
Yuiv continued as tears flowed down his already raw cheeks, “…please. I’as really sorry’d. Don’t let em kill me. I promise to do anythin you want.” Yuiv wiped his eyes with the back of his dirty sleeve and turned to face Sitrell. “Ya think he’d hearded me?”
How could he answer the boy truthfully when he was so desperate for some scrap of hope? How could he lie and tell him that the Crystal Star was nothing more than a bright dot in the sky, so far away that its light took thousands of years to reach them, making it a strong possibility that it’d already faded from existence.
Looking into that dirty tear stained face―one that looked so much like Kyen’s―Sitrell couldn’t bring himself to preach the cruel truth. The boy was going to die in the morning, so why not let him hang onto his delusions? Sitrell nodded, feeling the liar with every motion.
The crown whispered to Yaokken great secrets, and showed him wondrous things, and soon it was all he cared about.
Chapter 5
Deadly Light
The remaining hours passed without talk, save for brief superficial exchanges between the two. The thick cloud of anxiety smothered any attempts at prolonged conversation. Dawn was rapidly approaching, and although Sitrell could see nothing but dark through the small barred window set near the ceiling, his internal clock told him it was almost morning. This thought had scarcely passed out of his mind when he heard the shrieking hinges of the dungeon’s outer door. Someone was coming. He listened intently and his blood turned cold as he recognized the sharp, choppy cadence of Aukasian accents. Two soldiers―I can handle two. He decided that if they were to have any opportunity to escape, it would be when their executioners came to fetch them. Sitrell stood, flattening himself against the cell’s side, gaining him a small measure of concealment. Yuiv stood, face pale as his stare vacillated between the cell door and Sitrell.
Sitrell was about to hiss at Yuiv to stop looking at him when he recognized another sound, the rhythmic clanking of armor. Curiosity overcame him and he moved toward the cell door in an effort to view the dungeon entrance. Walking behind two armed Aukasian soldiers, was a man suited from head to foot in full black armor. He carried a spear in his right hand and had a bulging satchel slung over his left shoulder. Three! And one of them an Imperial Guard! Sitrell ground his teeth in frightened frustration.
The Imperial Guard were a group of soldiers handpicked by the Aukasian
emperor to be his bodyguards and they often doubled as his personal assassins. They were elite warriors, and while Sitrell was by no means a mediocre fighter, it would take all of his skill just to best one of them, and that was if he weren’t shackled and weapon-less. Well, he would make a fight of it. Dying here was better than being burned in the citadel’s furnace anyway. He shot a glance at Yuiv. The boy appeared to be on the edge of panic. If I die here, they will likely still burn him, he realized. Sitrell’s suicidal ambition faded at seeing the desperate fear in Yuiv’s face. He would never have abandoned his little brother to such a fate, and for some reason letting Yuiv die alone seemed just as reprehensible.
The Aukasian entourage stopped in front of their cell and the soldier at the lead unlocked and opened the barred door. The second soldier aimed a flintlock pistol at Sitrell while his companion stepped in, harshly wrestled Yuiv to the ground, and shackled his hands―the boy whimpering and crying throughout the process.
“Afraid of a lad of fourteen?” Sitrell growled. “Why not let him do the job right here and now,” He said as he motioned at the black knight. “Maybe unshackle us for sport? It’d likely make for a good wager.” Perhaps he could win a quick death for both he and Yuiv.
“Keep silent, dauchen!” barked the Aukasian soldier aiming the flintlock pistol at him. Sitrell recognized the contemptuous epithet as the Aukasian term for blood-traitor, an insult they applied to all citizens of Amigus.
History recorded that the nations of Amigus and Aukasia were born as the result of a schism between two sons of a prominent clan patriarch: Amaeg and Aukae, who were twins. And because both had an equal claim to clan leadership, a war erupted that split their people into two tribes, later the nations of Amigus and Aukasia. Although that was almost a thousand years ago, their dispute had never been resolved. Instead, it had become an inherited enmity, the result of which was centuries of on-again off-again war. Yes, the term blood-traitor did indeed fit, Sitrell decided, according to the Aukasian perspective anyway.
“Shaeka!” Sitrell retorted, a word from the ancient language that translated into coward. He doubted that these soldiers knew what it meant, but for him that added to the sting of the insult. To his surprise, he heard an amused scoff echo from inside the black knight’s red plumed helmet. Maybe being acquainted with the ancient language wasn’t as uncommon as he thought.
The soldier aiming the flintlock pistol at Sitrell stepped back and motioned for him to exit the cell. Sitrell complied but Yuiv, wailing in a frenzied panic, had to be physically forced to do the same. Sitrell ground his teeth as he watched the Aukasian soldier mercilessly pummel Yuiv in the stomach until the boy promised to be quiet.
The black knight warily watched the prisoners pass with their escorts before stepping in to follow. Before long, they had left the dungeon and were marching through the torch-lit, rust colored corridors of the citadel’s basement. The five men made their way through the winding maze of damp and musty tunnels toward the central furnace, conveniently located on the same level as the dungeon. Sitrell suspected that to be no coincidence. Having failed to goad the Aukasian soldiers into a fight, Sitrell surveyed his surroundings looking for anything that would provide an opportunity for escape. He glanced at Yuiv and found the boy sobbing.
Kyen, I’m sorry. The tunnels painfully reminded him of Salatia Taeo’s aqueducts.
After about ten minutes, the company arrived in front of two wide, iron doors, baked brown from the furnace they concealed. Sitrell could feel the heat radiating from within the chamber and apparently so could Yuiv as evidenced by his loudening whimpers. The Aukasian soldier escorting Yuiv walked up to the right side of the doors, inserted and twisted a key, and then swung them open. A suffocating blast of steam exploded over them, and Sitrell reflexively turned his head, the discomfort bordering on pain.
“Move” barked the soldier escorting Sitrell, his command accompanied by the sharp jab of his flintlock pistol.
They entered the hot and humid chamber, one large enough to be considered a small warehouse. Hundreds of rusty, bronze pipes affixed with valves ran along the walls and ceiling, all winding their way into an iron cylinder built into the chamber’s far wall. The bronze column was as wide as two men and as tall as three. In its center was a square grate through which he saw the dancing yellows, reds, and oranges of the fire that heated the entire citadel, a fire that was of necessity kept hot enough to double as a crematorium.
Halting the company ten paces in front of the furnace, the black knight pointed at the soldier holding Yuiv. The man nodded, released Yuiv, and walked over to the right side of the furnace door. He bent down and picked through a mound of coal until he found a long fork-ended tool which he used to carefully fling open the furnace door. A blast of intense heat forced the soldier back, at which point he turned to rejoin the group. Sitrell realized he was out of time and out of options. He worked furiously to think of something, anything, but nothing came.
As the soldier returned, the black knight pointed to Yuiv. The man pressed a fist to his chest in salute and then gripped Yuiv by the arm and began dragging him toward the open furnace door. There was no ceremony, no allowance for last words or messages to be given to loved ones, just cruel abrupt death.
“NO!” shrieked Yuiv. “PLEASE!” and the rest of his panicked words were an unintelligible mixture of screaming and crying.
Kyen
“He’s just a boy!” shouted Sitrell as he strained against his shackles. “Not this way! I beg you, have mercy!”
Yuiv’s struggling became fierce as the soldier dragged him closer to the furnace, so much so that he began to slow the man down. With a casual brutality that sickened Sitrell, the Aukasian soldier repeatedly struck Yuiv in the head until the boy was too insensible to put up a fight. Time seemed to slow as Sitrell watched in impotent horror the scene of Yuiv being forced closer to the hungry flames. Behind him, he heard the black knight’s armor clanking as he walked away. Was his job already done? Did he feel that staying to watch their deaths was unnecessary?
Sitrell watched as Yuiv was hefted into the Aukasian soldier’s arms. The man winced as he persevered through the intense heat inch by inch until poised to toss his burden through the open furnace door. At the very moment Sitrell braced himself to witness the boy be fed to the flames, he heard a most peculiar sound. It was a kind of high-pitched thrumming that escalated into a louder, echoing whine. A flash of green light washed over the room, and a ball of emerald lightning exploded from behind him, sailed through the air, and struck Yuiv’s would-be executioner in his left shoulder blade. The man crumpled forward, dropping the still-delirious Yuiv to his right side and screaming as his own head hit the searing metal at the base of the furnace. The soldier guarding Sitrell had only enough time to call out his fallen comrade’s name before another ball of emerald light came from behind, striking the soldier in the right side and throwing him clear of Sitrell.
Sitrell spun around to see the black knight standing with his right arm extended, holding a technological curiosity the likes of which he’d never seen. By the way it was held, it reminded him of a pistol, though he could hardly call it that. It was made of a substance that Sitrell wanted to classify as metal except it lacked the shine and looked to be light weight. It had an elongated barrel on the top and a slightly shorter one on the bottom, both of them together making him think of an animal’s slightly open muzzle. A soft, green glow emanated from between the two barrels which joined together in the back to form a handle. The top of the weapon was dotted with glowing jewels, surrounding a rectangular window that displayed moving luminescent letters.
The black knight lowered his strange weapon, and to Sitrell’s surprise, spoke without an Aukasian accent, “If you want to escape, then do exactly as I say and quickly!”
Sitrell nodded, suppressing the litany of questions forming in his mind as the black knight shoved a ring of keys into his hands.
“Unlock yourself and then the boy.” The black kni
ght then bent over the body of Sitrell’s would-be executioner, grabbed the corpse by the feet, and dragged it toward the open furnace door.
Sitrell unlocked and removed his shackles before running over to Yuiv and rolling him off of the body of the second Aukasian soldier. He flung his way through the ring of keys, the blaring heat of the open furnace drawing a torrent of sweat from his brow. As Yuiv’s shackles fell open, his eyes regained their focus and he groggily asked, “What happened?”
Sitrell wasn’t sure he had an answer, but before he could say anything, the black knight barked, “Assist me!”
The black knight was standing over the body of the first Aukasian soldier facing the open furnace door. Nodding, Sitrell stood and moved to grab the corpse by the arms. Together, the two men flung it into the fire, repeating the process for the dead man’s comrade. Upon completion of the grim necessity, the black knight scooped up the two sets of open shackles and tossed them into the furnace, before using the fork-ended tool to slam the door shut.
“Follow me,” the black knight commanded as he turned and strode toward the chamber doors, slowing only to retrieve his spear and satchel from the ground.
“Come on.” Sitrell grabbed Yuiv by the arm and the two followed the black knight out of the furnace chamber and into the connecting hallway.
The black knight surveyed the pipe-like corridor before pausing and turning back to whisper, “I’ve stored another suit of Imperial Guard armor in a utility closet not very far from here. It should be camouflage enough to give you a chance at escape.” The black knight shot Yuiv a glance. “I only expected you, Commander Trauel. I’m afraid you’ll have to improvise something for the boy.”
Without another word, the black knight turned and resumed his brisk, purposeful stride down the hall. He knows who I am. Sitrell was sure that not just any Aukasian soldier would have that kind of information, but this man wasn’t Aukasian. That much was obvious by the lack of an accent.
Heroes of the Crystal Star (Valcoria Book 1) Page 5