Day 5. Ruins and Ruin

Chapter 12. 

   Night fell over the Raelle Citadel atop the central bluff of Taro Myule. A troop of soldiers, dressed in leather armor with black cloaks over top and dark caps on their heads, stood in waiting in the king’s garden, seven of them in total. They stood in silence, watching the eastern entrance to the garden, waiting for their king. 

   Kit entered the garden with Rusk in tow, the Olereon man dressed in dark gray, a color he claimed blended better with the shadows below ground. He had a fellow with him, a man who would not give his name, and kept his hood on even as he bowed before Kit. 

   Distantly, Kit thought everyone moved to accept him as king far too quickly. 

   The four of them, Ulrig tailing behind into the garden, moved to stand before the troop of seven, all men Kit had handpicked to come on their night escapade. 

   “No no,” said Rusk, shaking his head with force, his words whispering soft as a breeze. “Too many, far too many.” 

   Kit shook his own head. “I won’t go unprepared into a den of snakes,” he said. 

   Rusk shrugged, raising his hands in a defeated gesture. “This is not prepared, this is foolishness.” 

   Kit felt Ulrig rustle beside him, surely not liking the comment directed at his leader. “What do you propose?” asked Kit, staring at the man hard in the clouded moonlight. 

   “Three,” said the man. He pointed to Kit, to Ulrig, and finally to his silent partner. “No more.”

   Kit closed his eyes for a brief moment, trying to gather his composure. What was he doing? Attempting to sneak about in the middle of the night, going underground to a place he didn’t even know existed, on the words of a man he barely knew for what? The honor of his friend? Eadric was dead, Kit held him himself, watched him die. And what if it were true, what if these druids had made some switch before sealing the tomb? What then? It was just a body, was it not? Eadric no longer lived within. 

   And yet. . . 

   To have any thought that his best friend was there, being tormented even beyond death, did not stand well with him. 

   “Patrol,” he said finally, turning to the seven cloaked men. He could see them stiffen at the command. They were ready for the adventure of the night, ready to guard their king. “Watch the palace grounds and monitor anything that seems suspicious. Stanho, you have my approval.” 

   One of the men gave a nod, then said, “This monk, my lord?”

   Kit reached out and patted Rusk on the back. “Take him to the gaol until my return. Give Borneld a bit of company.” 

   The man saluted, two fingers to his forehead, and then the seven men surrounded Rusk and hurried him out of the garden. Only three remained. 

   “Your name?” asked Kit, turning to Rusk’s companion. His face was still hidden by his low hood. 

   “No name, my lord, just as before. If you must address me you can call me Fox, for it was the pet name my father gave me.” 

   There was a smile of white teeth within the hood, and Kit thought it was due to the man’s use of a double entendre. The nickname gave him a start, for many in the Knights of Arl called Kit ‘little fox’. He brushed it away. 

   “Onward?” asked Ulrig, raising a hood over his head. Kit nodded and pulled a soft cap from his cloak, pulled it low over his eyes so the brim nearly blocked his view, and then nodded to Fox, their guide. 

   “Let us not delay,” he said. 

   The concealed man nodded once, then turned and led them from the garden and through the citadel to the bluff lifts. They rode the ones used for servants and goods, and went down and down all in silence. 

   It was a long, quiet walk to the southern quarter, and the trio spent most of the time in the shadows. Kit hadn’t had a chance yet to officially end the curfews, but he made certain that none of his men would enforce the rule. He had spoken with The Ox as well, and conveyed the same message. 

   Yet, the word must not have spread to the rest of the citizens of Taro Myule, for the streets were almost entirely deserted. There were a few drunken revelers wandering in discordant strides on certain streets, and occasionally a young woman would hurry from a dark doorway to another or an old man would be found sitting at a table outside a shop with a pipe, their scowls always deep enough to hide their eyes entirely. Kit saw it all in a blur as he followed Fox. 

   Finally, the man led them into a church, tall with six spires around the six points of the Veclian crux shape, and marked with beautiful painted glass and strange creatures carved in stone along the walls. It seemed the custom of the Veclian church to build their temples in the shape of their holy symbol. 

   “It all begins with god, yes?” asked Fox as he led them to the side of the tall cathedral and into a small wooden door that had been painted to match the color and design of the bricks surrounding it. It was a crude facsimile and the paint had worn and smudged over the years, but Kit could imagine at one time it might have really concealed the door. 

   The building was empty. 

   There were no seats for parishioners, there was no lectern at the head of the hall, and strangely enough, there were no piles of rags and bedrolls that would denote the deeply impoverished making the place their home. Kit asked Fox about it as they moved through the massive empty space, into one of the wings of the crux shape. 

   “Sacred ground,” answered the man in a soft whisper, the sound still echoing hauntingly around them, mixed with the repeating thuds of their footfalls. “Traditions are hard to lose, even through generations, and though many of the beggars and poor are caught up in addiction to skunk or snake meat, they still have enough sense to avoid defiling such a place.” 

   He led them through a room and down a stairwell, the air growing cooler as they went below. Suddenly, he stopped. 

   Kit caught his breath and put a hand out to stop Ulrig, but the man was already stopped and Kit noticed, in nearly non existent light, that his guard had a hand inside his cloak and was likely gripping a short sword. 

   “There is someone about,” breathed Fox, his face close to Kit and Ulrig’s. 

   “Above or below?” asked Ulrig. 

   The man waited a second, saying nothing. Then, he gave the slightest shrug and continued on down the steps, saying nothing more. 

   Kit and Ulrig glanced at each other, passing a note of caution between themselves, and followed the man into the dark. 

Chapter 13. 

   “It is not exactly one city upon another.” 

   They had traveled down and down into darkness so complete that Kit found his eyes open or closed made no difference. He had a hand on Fox’s shoulder and Ulrig had a hand on his, as they walked in silence along a path that might have been terrible or beautiful, but completely hidden in the total darkness. Then, their guide had stopped, bent down and ruffled with what sounded like glass and stone. Then a faint glow came about before the man’s face and he raised a lamp made from a small glass jar, the glass clouded and milky to such a degree that the light was hardly a glow. And yet, in the dark beneath Taro Myule, it seemed as the summer sun. 

   The man had led them on and on, his glass lamp showing the world they had gone into. 

   Much of it looked like the Northern Quarter of the above ground city, with carved pillars and carefully shaped walls. The roofs of which were stone or iron above them. Most of it was rubble. It was not as Kit had imagined, the idea of a city beneath a city, for really it was just a series of old tunnels left behind in some of the buildings that had not been destroyed. They crawled through holes in the rock in places, over piles of broken stone and rotten wood, but mostly they walked through houses and buildings of people long ago, those who likely never imagined another city would be built upon their ruin. 

   “Two hundred years ago,” said Fox as they walked, “war fell upon the city from three sides. Tribal bands of marauders from the north, where the kingdom’s farmland is now, armies from the southeast in what has become Midcharia, and mountain people with trained fighting bears from the west. They are where the ferrafolk legends come from. Much of Taro Myule was destroyed in the conflict, as the plains people had a species of massive horse-draconian hybrids they trained for battle. They were colossal beasts and with a bonded rider were able to destroy much in their path.” 

   “This is legends,” said Kit. “Dragons are a myth, as are farrafolk, you just admitted it yourself.”

   The man shrugged, his back to them as he continued to lead. 

   “How did the city survive?” asked Ulrig, and Kit looked at the man to see a faint look of intrigue on his face. Perhaps there was an interest in stories that Kit never knew about the man. 

   “The Citadel has never been defeated,” said the man. “Even your little coup would not be rightly considered a defeat. People have snuck in before you, in the history of the palace, but the building has never been destroyed. At the time of this war, Taro Myule was a centrality of invention, primarily in the military sector, and that great structure atop the bluff was home to a dangerous arsenal. The King at the time, Mogroth Farstride, so named due to his extensive travels while king, believed the dragons would return to the lands from the south, perhaps even rising out of the southern ocean, and so he had his artificers design weapons to shoot enemies from the skies.” 

   The man turned to them and a smile showed in the lamp light. “I digress. The superior weaponry of the Citadel, while not as widespread in the city below. Gave the kingdom its victory, though the cost was great and much of the city was destroyed. The technology was forgotten as soldier warfare became more prevalent with the discovery of the beans and the three goat breeds who could consume them safely, and the world moved on.” 

  “You know a great deal for a monk,” said Kit. 

   “We would not say monks, we would say oarsmen,” said the man. But he nodded in some form of acceptance. “We are scholars above all, learners and holders of history and tradition, of all kinds across all lands. Water does not remain contained if there is enough of it, and as it must spread across the world, so must we.” 

   They came to a doorway that had long since lost its wooden door, and Fox turned to them, his face barely lit by the glow of the lamp, showing more features than Kit had seen before. 

   The man’s face was deeply scarred. Pink and white marks spread about his features, some of the marks wide and uniform as though made by an animal claw or a terrible tool, while others were jagged or round and puffy, as if the man had been burned repeatedly by pokers or even brands. 

   Then the lamp went out and they were once again in darkness. 

   “This is where we found them,” said Fox, his faceless voice coming to them from only inches away. “Hold tight, and tread softly. 

   They assumed their train position as before and walked in silence through the ruins of the city below the city, among what could have been anything. But then, light came again. 

   It was faint at first, from somewhere ahead, and then Kit could see the back of Fox’s hood, and his hand on the man’s shoulder, and then they were crouching down and creeping along until the light was flickering brightness that showed everything. They moved through a doorway, around a pile of rubble, and to a small window set low in the wall, on the other side of the window was a large open room perhaps the size of the throne room in the citadel above. It was supported by columns that had been reinforced by steel bands and wooden beams, but it was not the structure that stood out to Kit. No, it was the people. 

   Dozens of men and women milled about in the large space, all dressed in white gowns as though they were ready for bed, though the gowns were dirty and marred with dark streaks, the color of which Kit knew to be dried blood. Someone was whistling and someone was singing, and they moved about the space with a busy air of productivity. 

   There were others in the room as well, ones who did not move so much. 

   Lying on beds–perhaps double the amount of walking people–were men and women wrapped in gray blankets and staring up at the ceiling with open eyes that might have been dead. They all might have been dead, Kit realized, for he saw none of them moving. There were men and women and not all of them were Raellian, as the skin colors and forms were not the same among all those prone. Yet, they had one common factor: cracking lightning bolt marks cut across all of their faces, wrapping over their noses and cheeks and around their eyes. The same marks that disfigured Eadric’s face, given to him by the dead Spokesman. 

   Kit’s heart beat in his chest with the power of a race horse waiting at the gate. He felt Ulrig’s hand on his shoulder and wondered if the man was making an attempt to hold Kit back, lest he try to dash out into the room and search for Eadric. 

   As the figures lay, it was difficult to mark out any distinctive traits from the rest of them. Only their faces were visible and aside from the shade of their skin and the male or female shape, they could have been anyone. 

   “He is there,” whispered Fox, so close to Kit’s ear that a shiver went down his spine at the tickling. 

   Kit looked down to see the man’s finger just apart from his body enough to make out in the wan light, and he tried to follow the angle to one of the beds and the man who lay upon it. 

   Instantly, Kit knew the man was not his adoptive brother. The hair was blond and there was an aquiline shape to the man’s face, but his nose was wrong and hair gathered beneath it, the light dusting of a youthful mustache. Eadric was notoriously late in growing facial hair, not that he would have kept it if he could grow it, but he had died as smooth of face as he had lived. 

   “No,” breathed Kit back into the man’s ear. 

  He felt Fox stiffen beside him and then watched as the man scanned the room, searching.

   There was no Eadric. Not all of the beds were visible, some hidden behind pillars or blocked by large wooden structures that had clearly been built in the last several decades, but Kit knew his friend was not there, because his friend was dead. And yet, he did not feel as though the followers of this water god had fouled him completely. There was something down here, something that seemed at the very least clandestine, and that meant an investigation. He was king, wasn’t he? And this was his city, which meant he should know what took place within. 

   Kit looked to Ulrig and could barely make out the man’s eyes reflecting the light from the room below, burning in round iron braziers among the beds. The guard’s face was as placid as usual, a stone mask that he wore at all times. Kit nudged him and Ulrig’s eyes flicked over. Kit shook his head and the man copied the gesture, then they both slipped backwards from the window. 

   Retreated as they were they could see Fox’s frame hunched at the opening, and they waited a moment for him to notice their departure. When he did he dropped below the window and slid backward until he was at the back of the room next to them. 

   “Perhaps he has been moved,” whispered the man. 

   Kit shook his head. “Have you seen Eadric the Blessed?” 

   The man was motionless for a time before finally shaking his head. 

   Kit placed a hand on the man’s shoulder, gently, with no sense in eliciting fear. “Let us depart,” he whispered. 

   The man’s head fell, the hood entirely concealing even his chin. “My lord, I have failed you. I have failed our order and our faith, and–”

   “Lead me to the surface once more,” Kit cut in, “and we will discuss failure there.” 

  The man raised his head, his chest heaving with a sigh, but he gave a single nod and led them from the darkness. 

Chapter 14. 

   “You put them in the same cell?” 

   The man nodded with a shrug as he hurried along side Valia as they jogged through the dark corridors of the lower citadel levels. Valia had yet to explore every corner of the place, and the underside of the palace grounds were certainly later on her list, the gardens and libraries easily taking the first place. 

   “Kit told us to put him with Borneld,” said the man. 

   “He is your king now!” snapped Valia. “If you do not address him as such, why should others?” She didn’t wait for the man to reply. “I am sure when the King said to put him in the Gaol and mentioned Borneld, that he did not intend for them to occupy the same space!” 

   They rounded a corner and came upon a group of guards milling about in a group in the hallway. 

   “Clear the way!” shouted the guard who ran with Valia. “Her ladyship, here!” 

   There were whispers of Valia’s name among the men, all those who knew her as Arloth’s daughter and Eadric’s sister long before she was special consul to the King, still finding it hard to see her as such just as they found it hard to see Kit as the king. But the men stepped aside showing a doorway in the side of the corridor with lamp light glowing within and a terrible moaning spilling out. 

   “It’s not pretty, my lady,” said the guard who had contacted her, but Valia ignored him and entered the room. 

   It had been several hours since Kit left the citadel with Ulrig and that man from the monks, and she had gone for a wash and then to one of the rooftop gardens to watch the stars. The sky was cloudy, but there were some pinpricks of light behind the veil, and she watched them as she thought of her brother and her parents, and those she missed back in the forest. Then, the guard had come to her running and calling for her attention, for the monk had been taken to the prison ward. 

   It was a rush from there. 

  Valia looked into the room, her sharp eyes taking in everything quickly, the straw cots at knee height, the doctor in his white smock stained with various colors, the captain of the goal in the corner with his spear in his hand, and the two figures on the cots in the room. One of the men shivered and looked to be broken out with red boils, some sort of decay having taken over his body, while the other man hardly looked like a man at all. If it wasn’t for his brown clothing, Valia would have had no idea of who he was. 

   She approached the cot, fear rising up in her along with the taste of vomit in her throat, threatening to spill out. His face was a mess of viscera, smashed in from every angle, it looked like a meat stew one day beyond spoiled. And yet, his eyes were clear and visible in the mess, two blue orbs shining up at her as Valia leaned over him. 

  “Hardly alive,” said the doctor from the other side of the cot. “I’ve seen men trampled by oxen and some pinned between gristmills, but this is another story, m’ lady.” The man wiped his forehead with a bloody gloved hand, smearing the stuff above his eyebrows. “A machine or an animal hurts you without interest; you just happen to be in their way. A man hurts you in a personal matter; he intends all he gives you.” 

   Valia nodded, not able to speak. Just that afternoon she had spoken with this man atop an ancient preserved belltower in the northern quarter of the city, not far from the cemetery where Eadric’s burial took place. He was not much older than she, perhaps less than a decade, and there was a kind joy to his face and an eagerness to his words, even as he spoke of his underground theory. The man lying on the bed beneath her was not the same man, and really, not a man at all. 

   She knelt, managing her vomit for the time being, and reached out to take his hand. 

   “Broken most of his fingers,” said the doctor before she could grab him. Valia quickly pulled away. “Not much isn’t broken,” the doctor continued. “I am not equipped to care for him beyond what I’ve done here,” he said. “You must send him to the physikers down in the eastern quarter. I believe he will not die this night, but beyond that I cannot say.” 

   “Thank you,” Valia said, not looking up from Rusk’s ruined face. 

  “You have an animal in that cage,” said the doctor in a lower voice than before. “The hangman is perhaps his only justice.” 

  With that, the doctor left the room, on to other other business.

   Valia knelt with Rusk a moment longer before rising to face the goal captain, still standing in the corner. He was quite the statue. 

   “Take me to Borneld,” she said. 

   The man stepped forward and opened his mouth, but before he could protest, Valia cut him off with one word. “Now.” 

   He sat in the center of the cage, wearing only black trousers cut off below the knee, no shoes on his feet, and blood covering his chest, arms, and face. Valia didn’t think any of it was his own. 

   “He won’t die,” she said as she stopped on the safe side of the cage. Stanho and other guards flanked her closely, as if they were afraid the large brute of a man would break out of the iron bars in an instant and hurt their lady as they did the monk. 

   “You buried him without me,” said the man, his voice a deep roar in the back of his throat. His volume was low, there was no shout in him, but his words nearly vibrated the bars of the cage. “I loved him,” he said. 

   The words caught Valia off guard. Instantly she thought of Rusk, the dying monk a floor above where she stood, but quickly she realized who the man was speaking of. 

  “You killed so many in the city, Borneld,” she said. “You lost your ability to watch the ones you love be buried.”

   “Your father would not stand for this,” muttered the bloody man. 

  “You do not know my father!” snapped Valia. She stepped closer to the bars and instantly felt one of the guard’s hands on her arm. She didn’t try to push him off. “What went wrong, Borneld? You were one of my father’s closest allies, Eadric put you in charge of the city while he took the Citadel. And you broke his trust, tearing apart his rules and morals. Where did you go wrong?” 

   “Godsmar killed Arloth,” answered the man, hate spilling from his eyes, whether for her or for the dead king he could not tell. “I wished to be in that room, to go alongside your brother to the kill, but he sent me into the swine, to ensure no piggies were squealing out of order.” He spat something dark to the ground a few feet in front of him. “If I was there, your brother would be alive.” 

   “He trusted only you in the city, to hold off revolts and rebellions! Can you not see that?” 

   Borneld snorted a nasty laugh. “Hard to revolt when you’re bleeding out hanging fifteen feet in the air from your own gibbets.” He laughed again and shook his head. “You really think you could take over the city without a changing of the guard? You are children, but I did not think you stupid until now.” 

   “Kit will decide your fate,” Valia said, at a loss for words. 

   She turned to go and the man called after her. 

   “You have no knowledge of what you’re doing, little girl! Wars will come and revolutions, and beasts from the Pits of Lorn, and you’ll still be attempting to play dollhouse with that silly little fox runt! Good luck, princess, good luck!” 

   Valia didn’t turn around, didn’t give the man any satisfaction. She left the gaol and walked back to her chambers in private, not letting Stanho or any of the guards follow her. She didn’t want to run away and leave Kit with all that was happening, but she couldn’t stay in Taro Myule any longer. She must meet with the remaining Spokesmen and make a plan. It was the relic or nothing.