Aethosphere Chronicles: Storm of Chains
Page 12
Drish scowled at the perceived injustice of the pirate’s resentment, until he spotted the blood encrusted note clenched in the pirate captain’s fist, then his face fell and his heart took to crashing against his chest. It was the confession letter he’d written to the Empire.
“I’ve tried to rationalize this for the past hour,” snarled the captain, “reading and rereading and trying to understand…but I can’t. So would you care to explain it?”
“What have you got there, Bar?” Portman asked, but the captain’s seething glare remained fixed on the noble.
Drish stood in helpless silence. It seemed like he’d written that note a hundred years ago; he wasn’t even sure he was the same man. So much has happened. How can Bar hold it against me now? It’s ridiculous; irrelevant and vastly out of context. “That… I wrote it days ago, before all of this happened,” he tried to justify.
“What is it,” asked Abigail with dark curiosity.
“Maybe Drish would like to explain it, seems he’s pretty good at rationalizations.”
“Abigail, it’s nothing,” he tried to deflect, chuckling dryly as if it were all a joke, “A misunderstanding,” and yet he found himself backing towards the wall in fear just the same. Seeing that beautiful woman, the one he’d given his heart over to, probing him with those large doleful eyes of hers, stirred his guilt.
The captain retorted with a burst of mocking laughter. “Nothing, he says… fitting coming straight from the lips of a treacherous, collaborating, lying piece of filth such as you.” The captain took two menacing steps towards Drish.
The guilty noble tried to retreat, but found himself trapped when his back hit the cold stone of the wall. Portman, Lance, Fen, O’Dylan, Gryph; each of those leftover men looked at him darkly, as though any one of them might attack him at the drop of a hat.
Nowhere to go.
Abigail stepped between the pirates and the collaborator. Her face twisted into conflicting emotions, seeming to be angry at Bar, but also concerned and puzzled. “Would someone mind explaining to me just what the hell is going on here between the two of you?”
Without taking his predatory eyes off the treacherous aristocrat, Bar snapped, “See for yourself, Abby,” and then he extended her the note.
“No,” said the panicked noble, trying to reach for the letter, but Bar flashed forward and cuffed him hard across the face.
“Do you have any idea how much we risked coming back for you…? We went to Port Armageddon!” The pirate bared his teeth like a wolf, and for a moment, Drish thought he might lunge and latch onto his throat. “Rook…Tanner, Hallsbjorn—countless others—they all died for you! For nothing! Your own father, Drish! Gods, I could shoot you right here myself.” The pirate drew his gun.
“Bar!” yelled Abigail furiously. The others closed in while Drish cupped his bleeding nose. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Read the damn letter!”
Powerless, terrified, Drish watched the woman snatch the damning letter away from the captain, angry with him at first, until her eyes began to race over the hand-scrawled words. Her expression changed from anger, to shock, and then to despair. She looked at up to Drish with her tear-filled eyes, pleading for it not to be so.
“You have to understand,” whispered the noble, and that’s when he saw the change; the moment her love for him turned to loathing; when her saffron eyes became overflowing with hate.
“Someone mind explaining what’s on that letter that’s got you all so bothered.” Portman maneuvered his imposing form into the gathering. Abigail merely held the note at arm’s length and the resistance leader gingerly plucked it from her fingers.
In a last ditch moment of desperation, Drish tried to explain himself as Portman read through the document. “I was only trying to survive,” he spoke desperately, “That was before any of this; when it was just me against the world. I’ve changed…” And it was true. Everything had changed. Abigail had come into his life and made him want to be a better man. “You changed me, Abby. You must realize I had no intention of actually handing that over to the Empire. We can move past this; leave it all behind and start fresh somewhere else.”
“…Signed, Drish,” Portman finished reading, and then spat at the noble’s feet. “Worthless traitor.” The note slipped from his hands and fluttered to the wet ground, but Drish didn’t care. His eyes were on Abigail’s back, and it seemed she might be crying the way she trembled.
“Oh, Drish…” her voice echoed in sad disappointment, but it was the click of Bar’s gun-hammer that made the most compelling counterargument.
“Do what you will,” said Portman turning away and motioning to his men, “He’s not welcome, and I wash my hands of this filth.”
It was all more than the noble could bear. He was being strangled by a storm of chains not of his making. But instead of despairing, he found anger burning white-hot through his soul. He gingerly placed the pack containing his father’s wine upon the floor, before he took off his glasses and set to polishing the lenses with the sleeve of his cotton shirt. “You people think everything is so simple,” he said with a throaty husk, and all eyes fell on him, “you all think it’s so cut-and-dry; black and white. We’re Ascellans and they’re imperials, and now we must fight to the death, even if it’s a hopeless cause…especially because it’s a hopeless cause—because then that somehow makes you even more in the right. So let’s go ahead, let’s burn down our own homes; bomb our own markets; kill our own people to drive them away. Let’s consign ourselves to light the torch of misery with our own bodies and burn forever in our damnable pride; let’s just roast away in the lamentable fires of our former glory!
“Well, you simply fail to grasp the complexities of the real world, the shifting tide of politics. Nations rise and fall…but do you know why humanity persists, because we hunker down and we create a life for ourselves in the ashes. Not everyone wants to fight in the trenches for an idea, for the abstract notion of freedom and self-rule—for impossible restoration. Time refuses to move backwards like that! Some of us just want to move on and live out our lives the best we can! So yeah, when the Iron Empire gave me the opportunity to pick up the pieces and move on with my life, I took it—and gladly! We should’ve all counted ourselves lucky to find this offer lying before us. You fight for the UKA,” he scoffed bitterly. “Well the UKA is long gone! But I’m not… I’m right here, I’m alive, Abigail, and so are you! And that’s what I fight for!”
There was a silence that pervaded the tunnel after Drish had finished, the ghosts of his words hanging on the ancient stone. Pirate and insurgent had backed away, Abigail had refused to look at him, and Bar stood frozen with his gun pointed shakily at the traitor. If anything of what Drish had said made any impact, he wasn’t sure, but he felt hot and flustered, full of anger and sadness and emptiness towards them all. They just didn’t seem to understand how this whole stupid situation was a travesty flying in the face of civilized sensibility. If the war had never happened he would still be living a life of privilege, the captain would still be in the Royal Air Navy, and Abigail would…
“Abigail,” Drish let his voice carry gently through the twilight. “May I ask what you did before the war?”
There was a long pause before the girl finally answered in soft whisper, “I was a wife and a mother.” And then she turned.
The crack of the pistol was startling in the small space, even after all the gun battles Drish had been witnessed to during his brief time as a fugitive. Maybe this one was much more poignant because it was the one that laid a claim to his life.
He knew he was shot, and not because he felt the pain—that would come seconds later—but because he saw the smoking gun held in Abigail’s hand, and that barrel was pointed at his stomach. There was nowhere else for the bullet to go. When he placed his hands to his vest he was greeted by the feel of warm and sticky fluid. When he pulled them away again he gasped at the sight of his own blood. It appeared blackened and corrupt in
the strangled torchlight as it stained his fingers, coursed down his vest, and pattered to the stone floor in teardrops of red. Drish had once heard a doctor say—at some royal court gathering—that wounds to the liver always produced the darkest blood; and that wounds like that were almost always fatal.
Drish stared imploringly at the girl standing in front of him. “You… you’ve murdered me,” he accused softly, and then he fell to the ground as the pain crippled his ability to stand.
“I’m done here,” said Abigail without remorse, then she turned to join Portman and his men.
There was satisfaction in the old fighter’s face as he took her in and wrapped an arm around the girl in approval. “I suppose you’ll be going back to your ship now, Captain,” he called to Bar, but by then Drish had begun to slip into the waiting hands of death, and the pirate’s reply come out as a monosyllabic murmur.
Rapidly, the world lost context and meaning, and time became a thing without reference. In a flash, Drish’s love—Drish’s executioner—vanished, and yet the sound of her heels clacking off the stonework seemed to linger for hours. Somewhere in the moments in between, Drish heard Fen talking; his words seeming to move in time with the flicking torchlight. “Why are we still standing around here, Cap? We should get back to the ship.”
It seemed the pirate leader sighed over his words—or maybe it was the wind—either way it was a sound like the beating wings of a reaper come to claim Drish’s spirit in the name of Nekros. “I just can’t leave him here to die,” the man’s voice faded in and out as he spoke.
“And why not? You said yourself he’s a traitor.”
“He is…to us, but I think in his own warped-sort-of-way, he isn’t. You’re young…you may not understand, but I think I do now. There are complexities that govern every man’s actions, creating differing standards of right and wrong… I should know that better than anyone; and sometimes there’s just no real moral high-ground to stand on. I’m not saying I condone his actions, but we’re not perfect creatures, lad, and events are never perfectly scripted… And besides…I made a promise to a friend, and I aim on keeping that promise.”
A promise? Drish didn’t remember Bar making him any sort of promise, but as he tried to reason through what he might have been talking about, darkness came creeping over to swallow him whole.
Epilogue
It was some time later that Drish awoke to a relentless thumping coming from deep in the earth. At first he wasn’t sure if he was dead or alive; if maybe he’d awoken in the Pantheons’ Halls of Judgment; where Nekros, The God of Death, was in waiting, to weigh his soul and decide his afterlife. But a ruthless thirst had turned the noble’s mouth to sand and hinted that he might actually be alive after all. He tried to move, but only his head seemed inclined, lulling uselessly, and sending a spasm of deep pain coursing up through his neck. He attempted to sit up as the pain faded, but found his guts on fire as well. Only when he consigned himself to lie absolutely still did he feel any sort of tenuous grasp on relief.
Drish quickly realized he was no longer in the stone aqueduct, where Abigail had shot him, but was instead in some sort of room; an infirmary of sorts based on the beds and curtains surrounding him, but there were no windows to speak of and the unembellished room was small and constructed of wood, with only a scant collection of gas lamps to light it. On a nearby bench sat the backpack Abigail had given to him; containing the last token of his father—the bottle of Coronation Wine—but he wondered if it was still in there.
Did Abigail take it after she shot me? Though something told him she’d left it. Why else would the pack be here now? But he turned his head; couldn’t bear the sight of it any longer. Best to throw it into the mists when I’m well enough to walk out of here—but where is here?
It was only when the whole room gently swayed beneath him that he finally realized he was on an airship. The relentless thumping he heard must have been that of a steam engine running somewhere nearby. But again, where was here? Whose airship am I on?
And then he heard Bar Bazzon’s baritone voice, rumbling not far off; maybe on the other side of the rickety door at the room’s end; or maybe through the floor or ceiling. Who could tell? “So the whole crew knows now?” he was saying with plain irritation.
“That’s correct, Captain,” replied another man. There was a distinct refinement to this other voice that Drish found refreshing. “After Lance told me what happened down there, I felt duty bound to inform the crew; what with three of our own killed in the rescue.”
“I know who we lost; some of those men were close friends!”
“Captain, we have an imperial agent in our midst now! I was just doing what I though best for everyone onboard. The men have a right to know.”
“Funny what you think should and shouldn’t be known.”
“You do know we’ll have to kill him,” stated this second man brazenly.
Bar Bazzon’s voice turned to a low growl, “Aye, probably—but not till I say. Not a man touches him until I say so, you hear?”
“Hmm…well, that’s certainly going to be difficult with so many of the crew having been Ascellans once; some might think a lashing or two worth it just to kill a traitor like him.”
“Well, I’ll just stow him away in the forecastle—under lock and key—and if any man so much as brushed into him without my say so, Johonna, I’ll hold you personally responsible, understood?”
“Me? I’d think that unfair… After all, this is UKA business and really none of my concern; but I’ll see to his safety, if I must. As for you, I would feel derelict in my duties if I didn’t remind you that such an action as this is, no doubt, going to land you in a spot of trouble one of these days. Despite whatever your relationship with the Crimson Countess may or may not be, you should still watch your back in the days to come.”
“Is that a threat, Johonna?”
“Oh, no, no, my dear captain, simply a respectful—and strictly hypothetical—warning; in the best interest of your personal safety…of course.”
“Oh, of course, and don’t you worry your pretty little head over me one bit, I’ll be watching my back just fine, Mr. Wren, never you worry yourself about that.”
Discover Other Titles by the Author
From Aethosphere
Book 1: Coalescence of Shadows and Light
From the Aethosphere Chronicles
Winds of Duty
The Rat Warrens
And Coming soon!
Aethosphere: Book Two
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