by K L Reinhart
Terak saw the reaction on the human faces now visible on the other side, as the collection of people in gleaming bronze-colored plate and green cloaks staggered back in shock. Everyone might have magic, but not everyone could do what Inedi and the Arcanum could do with such ease.
The elf could see the air galleon of Brecha in the distance, floating above a growing arrangement of crates and wind-battered canvas shelters. Right in front of them was a delegation of humans, which varied from the ruddier and lighter skins of the north, to the darker skins of the south. They all wore the same green cloaks and had bronze helmets, breastplates, and greaves.
Terak could now see the cause of their racket. Beside the party stood two small wagons pulled by ponies, and on each one was a giant curved bronze trumpet, stylized into the open snarl of a dragon, and in the shape of an S.
A banner fluttered over the small delegation, green with a black bird splayed in the middle, a small golden crown clutched in its talons.
“May I present—” the speaking voice started to say. It was a man dressed without armor, the herald of their little group. But before he could finish, another figure broke from the assembled throng, his shoulder hunched as the wind tore at his long green cloak, edged in gold.
It was a young human man with dark brown hair and blue eyes. On his hip was a broadsword, and plastering his ragged brown hair to his forehead was a thin golden circlet.
“Magister Inedi, I thank you for your hospitality, and apologize for my herald’s . . . exuberance,” the young man said, pausing on the threshold of the Black Keep.
But something was wrong. Magister Inedi turned to glance in shock at Father Jacques at her side.
“That isn’t the Lord General!” she hissed.
Terak didn’t know if the young human had heard her or not, but he raised his voice once again.
“You appear surprised, Magister. I should have sent word ahead, but there was no time. My father is dead. I am Falan Brecha, the Lord General of Brecha now,” The young man straightened himself up despite the rising gales battering the Keep.
“My father was assassinated,” the man said with a hint of steel in his voice.
3
Acai Juice
“Terak, get to your rooms and change. You’ll find a white tabard and tunic in the locker,” Father Jacques hissed.
There was no chance of their muttered conversation being overheard, however. Once the initial greeting between the Magister and the newly-crowned Lord General had finished, Magister Inedi had dismissed the Chief External with a mere nod of her head. He motioned for the elf to follow him into the First Gallery ahead of the delegation still in the Eastern Courtyard behind them.
White tabard? Terak looked up at the Chief External with a frown. “That’s what the house staff wear.”
“Yes. Tonight, you will be acting as my personal server.” The Father cast a quick eye behind them, to see that the Magister and Arcanum were still negotiating with the Lord General and a small group of his people. Around them, more armor-clad humans marched through the Eastern Gate in a line.
“The Magister will suggest a simple meal to greet the Lord General, even at this late hour. I need you to be my eyes and ears where I cannot go,” Jacques said.
“Uh . . .” Terak frowned at the Chief’s plan. Usually he was so clever. “Have you seen me?” He gestured to himself with his long, pale fingers. I’m the only damn elf in this entire keep, he wanted to say. Don’t you think that I’m going to stand out just a little bit?
“Trust me, Novitiate,” the Chief said firmly. “I’ve been playing this game a lot longer than you. In the large redwood box on the top shelf, you will find a bottle labelled Acai Juice. It smells foul, but coat yourself liberally with it. Your hair, face, hands—any bit of your skin that shows—and especially your ears! Then meet me in the Banquet Hall.”
“Acai Juice . . .” Terak repeated, thinking that it had better be a miracle potion if it was going to make him not appear to be an elf!
“And take the washer’s stairs. Go, quickly now!” the Chief said in a low growl, before turning and taking the stairs three at a time, surprisingly fast for his limp.
Washer’s stairs. Got it. Terak sighed, before breaking into a run to the end of the First Gallery.
Terak knew why the Chief had chosen the washer’s stairs for his route. One of its entrances began at the end of the First Gallery, behind a faded and moth-eaten tapestry of purple and reds. It was actually a network of stairwells hidden behind the nooks and alcoves of the main keep, connected by tight corridors that the servants used.
Only large parts of it haven’t been used for years, Terak thought as he had to wave his hand through yet another mass of cobwebs to get to the landing he thought he needed. Father Jacques had made him memorize maps of the network, before blindfolding him and asking questions such as:
‘From the study halls to the kitchen, quickest route!’
‘Guard hut 9 to the western gate, via the library—go!’
Terak had gotten it wrong almost as much as he had gotten it right, but it seemed to get easier after a few months of these exercises.
He knew that it was all a part of the “quiet work” that the Enclave-External did. From sending and receiving coded messages, to hiding weapons about your body, to moving silently. “Sometimes, our work takes us places where others don’t want us to be,” was all the Chief External told the elf by way of explanation.
So Terak was fairly sure he was on the right path when he jumped down a small set of stairs and up to a crossroads of narrow tunnel-like corridors. Then he saw light crossing his path.
And heard someone humming.
Dammit! Terak slowed his pace as much as he dared and breathed shallowly and slowly. The humming stopped, followed by the clank of a bucket. It must be one of the house staff, preparing for their pre-dawn cleaning duties.
“Hello?” he heard a voice say. It was a quavering voice, and it sounded old and a bit scared. Terak froze, allowing his emotions to lower themselves as he had been taught to do, and his body to relax.
“I swear this place is haunted . . .” he heard the older man’s voice mutter to himself suspiciously, before moving off. Terak waited impatiently until the humming began once again, then he edged to the corridor-crossroads.
There was the older man in house staff whites, pulling a large wooden cask on small cartwheels that visibly steamed. Terak waited for the man to move away before he flashed across the intersection to the other side and ran on the balls of his feet. It was faster and quieter.
He hurried up the next set of stairs, and across a corridor that was shot through with shafts of light. This was because it looked down into the Main Banquet Hall itself. Through these viewing slits, servants could check the progress of the meal below them.
Not far now, the elf knew. This viewing-corridor ran along the very top of the Banquet Hall, itself almost three stories high. From there, the elf’s footsteps took him to the far end, where a loose brick that looked like any other brick hid the mechanism for the secret door. This opened onto his final spiral staircase, the one that led up to his suite of rooms.
Terak was glad to be greeted by the familiar sights and smells again. Even though he had only been gone a few hours, it felt like a lifetime ago.
Before him was the long L-shaped room with its work benches and shelves along the wall, littered with vials and bottles and powders and weapons and grimoires—all under the row of ancient iron-clad windows high under the rafters. At the far end was an iron stove and a selection of chairs at which Terak would sit in the evening—or incredibly early morning, as it usually happened—to hear snatches of lore, warnings, anecdotes, or retellings of some of Father Jacques previous missions.
Even those seemingly innocent moments served as a part of his training, however. The elf would be asked the next day, or a few days later, questions about what he had sleepily listened to.
‘Was it three men or two that attacked
me at Rolant’s Wharf?’ Father Jacques would ask tersely. At any moment during his training, whether striking at the wooden mannequin or over his bowl of food, Terak knew that he could be asked questions about anything that he had overheard, seen, or learned. It made the elf watch everything that he did almost with a second set of eyes, quietly taking everything in, cataloguing and sorting out the information in case it was needed in the future.
Terak’s own room was a smaller box-room through one door of the place, and it was through this that something small, furred, and brindle-haired exploded.
“Ratachook!” It squeaked angrily at him, leaping from chair arm to bench top, and skittering between the clutter until it was turning around in crazy circles before him.
“Frebius!” Terak greeted the strange rodent thing—with its pointed ears and long, prehensile tail—but large eyes that were the deepest of emerald greens. It was a rescued stray of Father Jacques’s on one of his many travels. Just like I am, in a way, the thought flashed through Terak’s mind.
“I’m sorry, Freeb,” Terak said. “I haven’t got time to play with you right now.”
He scooped a handful of seeds, dried berries, and apple rinds from the jar at the end of one of the shelves. He made a small pile on one cleared section of the workbench. The unique creature happily launched itself into the pile. Terak knew that Frebius hunted the length of the Black Keep anyway, so this was just a way to keep him happy for the moment.
While I go and get myself into a lot of trouble, Terak thought as he found the white set of staff clothes. If the other novitiates, acolytes, and journeymen see me, they’ll know that I didn’t die or get “disappeared” after everyone found out I was a null. Disappearing occasionally happened to the most . . . unruly of students. Only Novitiate Reticula, who had been at the Loranthian Shrine with him, knew that he was still alive.
Terak shrugged the outfit on, before tying his black hair into a tight braid that hung down the center of his back. He examined himself in the mirror.
“I look like an elf,” Terak said. The braid might have hidden his hair somewhat, but it had also made his pointed ears all the more noticeable.
“This is a dumb plan,” he muttered as he found the large redwood box on the top shelf, brought it down to thump on one of the workbenches, and wiped the dust from its lid.
The redwood box wasn’t even locked, and when Terak flipped the lid he found a selection of glass bottles inside, each stopped and filled to different degrees with different-colored liquids. The elf poured through them until he found one that appeared to be half filled with something as clear as water, but the wrap of parchment fixed to the bottle with tree resin clearly read Acai Juice, harvested near Star Forest.
Terak had no idea where “Star Forest” was, but now he wanted to go! But again, there was no time for curiosity as he wrenched and pulled at the cork stopper. It gave with a loud pop. A sickly-sweet stench like rotting fruit filled the room.
“Gah!” Terak almost dropped the bottle, as Frebius chittered indignantly, and ran around his small pile of seeds as if protecting it.
“First Moon!” Terak exclaimed through watering eyes as he set the bottle down and rubbed his hands together. Maybe this was Father Jacques cunning plan, he thought. Make me smell so heavens’ damn awful that no one will ever go near me.
The elf wrinkled his nose, shook his head, and then liberally applied the stuff that appeared just a little thicker than normal water—all over every part of his skin and hair that was visible. It felt cooling and left a surprisingly refreshing zing afterward—even though the substance appeared to evaporate almost instantly the moment it made contact with flesh. Terak looked once more into the mirror . . . to see that he was still, unmistakably, an elf.
“What do you think, Frebius?” He turned to his friend, who suddenly shrieked in rodent-fury, and vanished under the chairs as it scampered away.
“Oh, great,” Terak murmured. “So, this Acai Juice just makes everyone terrified of me?”
The elf was not feeling one bit enthused about his mission as he took a breath and remembered his mental exercises. Lower your feelings. Clear the mind. These were lessons he had learned in the Chief Arcanum’s study halls, before the old man refused to go near him anymore. But they were a cornerstone of the Path of Corrections. Or the Path of Pain, Terak thought as he struggled to concentrate.
He allowed his nervousness, his trepidation, and even his excitement, to slowly sink down through his body, leaving him feeling clear-headed and still. Then he opened his eyes. Everything in the room appeared to jump out in sharp focus.
To the Banquet Hall, Terak thought. He left his rooms and headed back to the washer’s stairs.
4
Banquet
It must be past midnight already, Terak thought as he hurried through the final staff viewing gallery, pausing only to peer through the holes in the walls.
Even at this late hour, the Chief Hospitality had managed to deck the long central tables with platters of food, kept warm on heated slabs of stone. The Banquet Hall was grand in size, and the columns embedded in its walls gave a suggestion of carvings, but the overall effect of the place was sepulchral rather than festive.
As well as the burning wall sconces, a row of not-too-bright balls of glowing light wavered over the central table, an addition that Terak had only ever seen used on Midwinter’s Solstice.
The feast for the new Lord General was already in full flow by the time Terak reached the viewing gallery. It was a little different than the rare feasts that the Enclave had. The seasonal celebrations of the Black Keep were generally somber things, but they did at least have the occasional troupe of minstrels or, more regularly, the long chant-verses of oral histories to entertain them.
It wasn’t that the feast below was noisy. Instead, it had managed to be almost entirely quiet, more somber than necessary for even the Enclave’s harsh standards!
Terak saw why. A line of the Brecha guards stood along each wall, standing at attention and watching the diners silently.
This doesn’t look like a celebration at all, Terak thought, glad that he had remembered to include his shoulder-and-back mounted weapons scabbard, with his knife snug above his hip.
There was a scuffle at the end of the viewing gallery, and Terak looked up suddenly to see a line of similarly white-clad house staff approaching him, led by none other than the tall, black-clad form of Chief Hospitality himself.
“—and you must make sure that their pitchers and wine glasses are constantly filled, but never filled for any of the Brothers and Sisters of the Enclave. Understood?” the thin-faced and somewhat haggard-looking man ordered the retinue.
He wants Brecha drunk before any of the Enclave are, Terak thought with his Enclave-External mind. That way they might make mistakes if they are here to cause trouble, or let important information slip more easily.
“You! What are you doing, dawdling there?” The Chief Hospitality had seen him, and pulled up short in front of Terak as the other house staff carried on around him, heading for the entrance stairs to the Banquet Hall itself.
“I, I—” Terak froze for a moment. How could this man not recognize him?
The Chief blinked and narrowed his already small eyes to look at the elf oddly.
“You . . . I’ve seen you about the Keep before . . .” he said indecisively. “But I can’t for the life of me remember your name . . .”
“Ter-Torlake,” Terak caught himself at the last moment.
“Tertorlake?” the Chief Hospitality said incredulously. “I’m sure I would remember that name! You sound like a noble’s son, lad. What was it, your family fall on hard times? Sent their youngest to work at the Black Keep in shame?”
Terak had no idea of anything that Hospitality could be referring to, apart from the fact that the Black Keep “fostered” foundlings such as himself occasionally. He also had no idea why the Chief Hospitality—whom Terak had seen not an hour ago—couldn’t recognize the
fact that he had pointy ears.
“Something like that, Chief-sir.” Terak bobbed his head. Maybe this Acai Juice is working, he thought, as the Chief Hospitality made a dismissive noise at the back of his throat.
“Well, get down there and get on with it, Tertorlake! Good heavens, don’t you know that we have the Lord General right here, under our roof!?” Then the Enclave Father turned, shaking his head at the ways of lesser-born nobility, and stalked back the way he had come.
It’s the Acai Juice, Terak thought with a smirk as he followed the other house staff. It’s like people don’t see me how I really am, but how they want to see me.
Armed with this knowledge, Terak emerged from the side-stairs and walked confidently into the Banquet Hall, making a beeline for a father in the exact same robes as every other senior Brother and Sister of the Enclave, but who sat just a couple spaces down from the Magister Inedi’s left-hand side. Father Jacques, the Chief External.
“Wine, sir?” Terak—or Tertorlake—stepped up to the left-hand side of the Chief External, imitating how he saw the other white-garbed house staff stand. He held a pitcher of white table wine, which he proffered for the Chief’s approval.
“Good,” Terak felt Father Jacques’s eyes on him, and the elf wondered if the Chief had some enchantment that could find a way past the concealing effects of the Acai Juice. The Father held up his glass to be taken and filled, and as Terak took it, he felt the man palm a small scrap of paper in his hand.
“Very good, Chief-sir,” Terak said demurely, palming the scrap of parchment expertly before stepping backward and making his way to the serving table. It was a struggle to force himself to move slowly, step by step back to the table and past the turned backs of the other Fathers, Brothers and Sisters, novitiates and acolytes of the Enclave. Once at the table, he pretended to be searching for the correct wine as he looked furtively at the note.