by Lucia Ashta
By the time the lone guard reached me, sword outstretched in one hand, a torch in the other, I’d just returned fully to my body. All tingling was gone.
When he pointed his sword at me with an arm that trembled in surprise, taking in what I could only imagine as a feverish lunacy in my eyes, he didn’t stand a chance. My reputation for ferocity and skill preceded me. I was about to prove it one hundred percent accurate.
Ten
The guard was too startled by the speed of my actions to call out for help or to beg me to spare his life. Normally, it wouldn’t have been necessary for him to beg mercy to stay my hand. But there had been nothing normal about the day, and I wasn’t my usual self.
I think I might have killed him, this man whom I didn’t know and had nothing in particular against. If he hadn’t been wearing the uniform of the royal guard and I hadn’t been an escaped prisoner, we might have shared some good stories over a pint. However, his job required him to capture me, my sense of self-preservation that I escape. We were at odds with each other, even if there was no personal reason for it. Soldiers had been killing each other for causes that were not their own for thousands of years.
It had taken me less than five seconds to rise to a crouch, charge at the guard’s legs, disarm him, and point his own sword at the artery at the side of his throat. The guard lay flat on his back, chest rising and falling too fast, wild eyes staring at the blade aimed at him.
I might have killed him out of displaced rage at two fathers, each worse than the other, or because of the senseless injustice and obstacles that kept me from Ilara, who represented the chance at a life filled with contentment (though a part of me knew that I couldn’t expect to find happiness in another, only in myself). My dreams weren’t many, nor were they unreasonable for a man of my station, and I was fed up with the unexpected, seemingly meaningless twists and turns that kept me forever from them.
I was done with lots of things just then. My patience had been exhausted for the day, perhaps the decade. I didn’t care about Aletox or Brachius, or the King and his selfish demands. I didn’t care that Lila might expose me—heck, I almost wished that she would now, to show Aletox and Brachius that they weren’t as untouchable as they believed. I was done with the threat of execution when I’d done nothing to deserve it. I was done with this fucking interminable day that seemed to get worse with each passing moment.
Even as my mind raced ahead of me, fury, a mostly ineffectual emotion, building and clouding my judgment, my eyes rested on the blade, though I barely registered it at first. The torch lay discarded to one side, flung from the guard’s grip when I tackled him, burning orange against the slate gray stone floor. Its flame danced upon the silver of the blade, making it seem as if the sword itself were aflame.
The flame licked downward, down toward the sharp point that had already drawn a drop of blood. The blood was a brilliant red that complemented the orange of the flame. For a second, I was mesmerized by it, by how easy it would be to spread more of that red, lots more.
But then the flame drew my eyes upward as if it were rooting for the survival of both friend and foe (of which the guard and I were truly neither). When my gaze reached the eyes of the guard, they shook me free of whatever had hold of me, whatever emotion had taken me far away from compassion, from the knowing that I faced another living, breathing human being that would live and die as randomly as I did, but who still didn’t need to die this day, not at my hand.
The eyes I looked into were an unremarkable brown that no one would have noticed much if not for how much fear they held. The guard looked at me and saw the hand that would deliver his death. Had he kissed his woman and kids that morning, telling them he would see them after the day’s work? I could so easily prove him a liar or a foolish optimist. Perhaps he had no family to which to go home. But what man didn’t yearn for that life, secretly, deep inside, where he didn’t have to admit it to anyone? What man didn’t want to have a woman who loved him and promised to stand by his side? What man wasn’t changed forever when he became a father, knowing he could help sculpt a human being more artfully than he’d been formed himself?
No, I wouldn’t rob this man of his opportunities, for love, for pain, for laughter, and tears. Those remained his.
I wouldn’t kill him. I was once more in command of the person I wanted to be, or perhaps the person I already was; I wasn’t sure yet. Regardless, I didn’t withdraw the tip of the sword from the small puncture wound at the side of the man’s neck. Now more than ever I would have to draw on my reputation for being a man better avoided in combat, or in a tunnel concealed within palace walls.
“If you want to live, get me out of here,” I growled. The man didn’t respond in any way. The fear in his eyes didn’t alleviate even though I’d just offered him the possibility of continued life. “Can you get me out of here?”
I could see that the guard wanted to communicate, but that he was afraid to shake his head or to move his jaw with his sword a fraction of an inch away from severing the artery responsible for pumping blood from his heart to his brain. I eased up, but only enough so he could speak.
“It will be difficult to escape. Everyone is looking for you. The alarm has been sounded.”
I pressed the tip of the sword into his skin again. This time, I drew two drops of the crimson fluid instead of the one.
“But I’m sure I can manage it,” he squeaked. From this close, he looked young. His skin was unmarred by the passing of time. He was likely a low-ranked guard with limited influence. Still, there was intelligence in his eyes.
I chose to believe him. I pulled the sword back a few inches and grabbed the torch without taking my eyes from him. “Get up.”
The guard did, instinctively moving a hand to the cut on his neck while he sat.
“How will you get me out?” I asked. “Can I get out through the tunnels?”
Even with his life under threat, the young guard still hesitated. Finally, “Yes. I know the tunnels well.”
If all the guards knew of the tunnels, this could be a problem. He seemed to sense where my thinking had gone.
“I don’t know of anyone else who is aware of them. Only I know of them among the guards of my rank.”
“How do you know of them?”
“My mother was an attendant to the late Queen. I was a kitchen boy. When I became a man, the Queen arranged for me to become a member of the royal guard. I’ve lived all my life within this palace. My mother had to be with the Queen much of the time. After I finished with my duties in the kitchens, if anyone noticed me unoccupied, they would put me to work with additional tasks that weren’t my responsibility.” He shrugged. “So I took to hiding when I was finished. I spent a lot of time exploring these tunnels once I found them.”
“Do they connect the entire palace?”
“Not all. But much of it.”
“Where are weapons that guards confiscate from prisoners kept?”
“In the captain of the guard’s receiving room.”
“Do the tunnels lead there? Or close to there?”
“No. And there are guards all around there. The captain of the guard’s receiving room is at the beginning of a hall that houses the guards.”
Damn. The recovery of my sword would have to wait.
“Which way do we go to get out of here?”
“This way,” the guard said and began walking. I would have warned him not to make any unexpected moves or to try anything heroic, but it wasn’t necessary. The fear wasn’t entirely gone from his eyes. He understood that he was outmatched.
“Was the Queen good to your mother?” I wanted to gauge how loyal he might be to the royal family and the mission of the royal guards to protect it.
He shrugged again, an expression of relative youth. “Sometimes.”
“Does your mother still live?”
“No. She was killed in the same attack as the Queen. The Queen had asked my mother to sleep in her antechamber that night.”
<
br /> “Did the Queen usually do that?”
“No. Never.”
“I’m sorry your mother was killed.” It was a funny thing to tell a man I was forcing to my will by the sword. It seemed callous, however, even for a soldier, not to care about the loss of someone’s mother. Mothers were special, or they could be. Mine had been from what little I remembered of her.
The guard shrugged again, the red shoulders of his otherwise gray uniform raising in the torchlight. “Death comes for us all. At least her death was swift.”
I saw his point. It was a good attitude to have as a citizen of Planet Origins. Neutrality could spare a lot of suffering in a world replete with reason for it.
“What is the path to the exit?”
“We have to follow the tunnels to the other side of the palace. The prison cell you were being kept in was on the east end. The only way out through the tunnels is at the west end, many stories below us.”
We were already several stories beneath the throne room and those other rooms meant to impress the public with a sense of control, regality, and security. How much farther down could we go, I wondered.
“What’s your name?” I asked, four feet behind him so that he couldn’t spin on me and disarm me.
“Kaijoot. My friends call me Kai.”
Strangely, I had a thought, perfectly out of place, that I might like to be this man’s friend.
“Kai, I’m Tanus.”
“I know who you are.” We walked for maybe forty feet before, “Are you as bad as they say you are?”
“That depends.”
“On?”
“Whether you’re my friend or foe.”
“Can we be friends then?” The question was earnest.
“I think I would like that.” Friendships forged in hidden tunnels beneath palaces were probably long lasting, I thought. An out-of-place smile that Kai couldn’t see crossed my face. “You seem like a good guy.”
“Oh, I am. I’m the best kind of good guy.”
“And what kind is that?”
“The kind that knows the way out of a palace where everyone is searching for you so that you can meet your deadline of execution tonight.”
He had a point. That did make him a much better kind of good guy than anyone else I knew right now.
“Are you a good guy?” he asked.
I didn’t hesitate. I knew my answer. It had come clear to me just today. “I’m trying to be.” And that was a good enough answer for Kai.
Eleven
We’d been walking for a long while. It was difficult to tell how long down there, where everything was cold and damp and dark save the small area the torch I carried could illuminate. But we’d walked long enough for Kai, ahead of me, to relax. He seemed almost to be enjoying himself, as if he were a boy again, seeking adventure and solitude within the tunnels.
I too had relaxed as we walked, the stress and shock of the long day wearing off the deeper beneath the palace we went. I had no desire to think of my parentage. And I already knew where I would go once I got out of here: wherever Dolpheus was, the only person I’d ever been able to rely on. I would find my oldest friend because I would need someone I could trust at my side for whatever came next, and I had some ideas of what that might be. Ideally, I would need an entire army at my side. However, Dolpheus would have to do. We’d faced impossible odds many times before and lived to tell of them, even if we rarely did.
I liked Kai. I wasn’t certain what it was about him that I liked—Was it his easygoing manner? His ability to flow with a situation and make the best of it no matter how incongruous it was? Or maybe it was that he was a self-made man, even if all he’d made himself into was a royal guard. I admired people that rose above their circumstances. It wasn’t a person’s station that made him who he was, it was his choices. A man made himself.
I could tell that Kai was an honorable man. It was easy to tell that with him. This didn’t mean that I didn’t have his sword at the ready in case he were to try to escape because I might be considering escape if I were in his shoes. I wouldn’t take it personally if he were considering it too. I’d taken command of his free will.
Still, I wanted to trust him, and what I considered the most while we walked was what I would do with him once we reached the exit to the tunnels. Unlike the situation with Lila, once I was free of the palace, I could leave Kai to do as he wished. What he might or might not say about me wasn’t a great danger to my future actions. It would be obvious that I’d escaped the palace, and it didn’t much matter whether the Royal Guard discovered how I’d done so—even though it would be advantageous to keep the existence of the tunnels a secret.
The more I considered our predicament, the more I became convinced that Kai wouldn’t say anything about my escape. The unfettered use of the tunnels seemed more important to him than it was to me. If he described my escape route, he would forever lose access to the tunnels; at least he would lose his ability to have privacy within them. And what else could he say if he didn’t explain how I’d forced him to help me escape? There was little that he could say that didn’t expose the tunnels. If he admitted to helping me, he would be pressed for an explanation. To protect his secret tunnels, he would have to lie, and lies were dangerous, far more dangerous than the truth. Lies had a way of tangling and tripping you up in their ever-expanding web of falsifications. Besides, I had the feeling that Kai didn’t like lying.
While we walked, I became convinced that the safest course of action for Kai was to say nothing at all about me, to allow himself to be included among the number of guards that had botched my recapture. He wouldn’t be lying; he would simply be omitting what he could contribute to the understanding of my escape.
“Are you happy as a royal guard?” I didn’t think I’d ever asked a captive so many personal questions. I wanted to know whether he aspired to climb the ranks of the royal guard.
Again, he shrugged. Apparently, it was a common response with him. “I guess so. It’s better than being a kitchen boy. I’m grateful to the late Queen for the placement.”
But… I knew the but was coming. I waited for it.
“But as a guard of low rank, a lot of the jobs required of me are unpleasant. I feel uncomfortable with what’s often asked of me. And I could do without that.” Another shrug. “I make the best of things, though.”
It didn’t seem as if he wanted to keep speaking of this, but I pressed him. I didn’t yet know why I wanted to know all these things, though I was beginning to suspect.
“What kinds of things are you required to do in your position that make you uncomfortable?”
We walked several more strides before he delivered his response. “Well, like today, I was ordered to whip one of the prisoners in the dungeons. The captain of the guard’s trying to get him to talk, but he won’t.”
“I see. And did you whip him?”
A few more strides in silence before the admission. “No.”
“How did you get out of it?”
“I traded duties with one of the other guards. He agreed to whip the prisoner. I agreed to take on his night shift this week.”
We continued down the tunnel. Its ceiling was lower here so that we had to walk it nearly in a crouch. The walls were even rougher than they’d been before as if less care went into its excavation the farther away we got from its start.
“It’s not because I’m a coward, you know.”
“I know,” I said.
“I just don’t like hurting people when it doesn’t seem necessary. The other guards love it when they’re assigned whipping or scourging or such. It’s just not my thing.”
“I don’t like to hurt people either.”
“Really?” He turned to look at me over his shoulder for the first time since we began our walk down the tunnel. “People say you’ve killed thousands of men. That you’re bloodthirsty on the battlefield. That you’re impossible to kill.”
I’d heard many of the rumors before. I hadn’t,
however, heard of my supposed immortality. “I assure you, I can die like anyone else.” Another several strides before I continued, when I realized that I didn’t want the opportunity to reflect upon the thousands of lives I’d been forced to take, mostly in the name of a king I didn’t think I respected anymore. “Even if I’ve killed many, it wasn’t because I enjoyed it. I haven’t enjoyed taking a single one of the lives I’ve ended. I’ve done no more than what was required of me in the moment.”
“I’ve never understood how men enjoy torturing and killing others.” Timidly, he admitted, “I’ve traded many guards for the night shifts they didn’t want over the last few years.”
“I’d do the same,” I said, and I meant it. I’d moved beyond the cynicism that comes from witnessing death as often as I had. I’d seen enough violent deaths to deliver me to compassion, both for friend and enemy. I’d experienced the death of others, and the threat of my own, enough to discover the senselessness in all that killing, in taking lives just because of some disagreement in belief, or in the attempted fruition of greed, the wanting of more than one has, even if it’s not needed.
We walked in quiet until the tunnel narrowed so much that we had to traverse it on our knees.
“We’re very near the end. I’ve never exited the tunnel through here, but I’m certain that this is the end of it.”
“Where does it come out?”
“I’m not sure exactly, but I think it may be the bit of forest beyond the west end of the palace, before the residential areas begin.”
He advanced on his hands and knees in the opening carved from rough stone. I didn’t hesitate before sliding his sword inside my shirt, hooking its guard at the neckline so it wouldn’t slide down my back. It turned out that I trusted this near stranger in the uniform of my current enemy. Besides, there was no way he could maneuver to turn and threaten me in the confined space. Unless this was all a trap, and he was leading me into the hands of the royal guards at the end of this long tunnel—which I very much doubted—I was safe.