042 – Capital

***

We sailed around the peninsula to the city of Nettlewreath, chosen as the capital of Sandgrave because of its well fortified position. The city occupied an island in the middle of a wide, muddy river, making it only reachable by boat or ferry. Gigantic walls encircled the city and pressed right up to the very edge of the island’s shore. Piers extended off the south east side of the city, outside the walls, and connected to one large gate that served as the main entrance.

The place was impenetrable to attack.

Siege engines that threw projectiles could not reach over the wide river. Invading forces had no place to land their ships and no way to surmount the high walls. Defenders at the parapets could easily shoot down at anyone who came near. In a real emergency, they could even set fire to the external docks to deny attackers that method of entrance. The city was like one big fortress. In a way, this place impressed me more than the citadel, because all the stones had been set in place by human hands.

The Lozenge cast her anchor at a pier, and we disembarked underneath the looming stone walls. Luniquial had to pay the harbormaster for docking here. Space was limited. Many ships chose to dock at the newer suburbs on the opposite shores of the river when they did not have vital business in the city itself. The fees were cheaper over there.

The gate had two paths for entrance. Merchants went through one, and they had to pay tariffs based on the goods or supplies they brought inside. So the customs officers took inventory of their wagon loads. The second path was for other travelers. We had to announce our names and pay smaller tolls. We paid a foot fee for each foot. Most people only two feet, or course, but horse riders paid for all six, no matter how many were touching the ground. We also paid an arms fee for each weapon we carried. The price was very high, but the guards gave us a permanent badge to be displayed on the weapon’s sheath. The badge proved we had paid and was good for multiple visits. Luniquial already had his own. Thankfully, they did not consider my staff to be a real weapon.

The city really liked to squeeze money out of people entering and leaving. Luniquial told me these various fees were known as taxes, and the local government used the money to pay for public projects. I supposed that taxation was an inevitable part of having a money based economy. Taxes were often imposed at the most practical places to collect them, such as at docks and gates and toll bridges.

On the other side of the gate, a gradually sloping ramp led up into the city itself. The differences between Nettlewreath and Dovestone immediately jumped out at me. Dovestone had a hilly terrain crisscrossed at random with narrow streets. They laid down the streets and built the houses with no rhyme or reason. The place was like a chaotic maze, but the complexity did give it a kind charm. Nettlewreath was built on a flat island with a circular shape. Eight main boulevards radiated out from center in the cardinal and ordinal directions. The resulting sections of this pie had streets laid out in regular grids.

“Why is this city so much more neat and orderly than Dovestone?” I asked Luniquial.

“Because it’s been destroyed eight times. The last time the locals rebuilt it, they made sure to do it right. That’s also why it has such big walls.”

“Destroyed by what?”

“Wars, fires, floods, monster hordes, and once from an attacking titan. But it’s been three hundred years since the great walls went up, and the place has held secure ever since. Seizing this city by force is impossible. It will only fall to subterfuge and guile.”

Technically, the Kingdom of Sandgrave was the enemy of the Void Phantoms, it’s just they didn’t know it yet. Our outpost looked tiny in comparison to this place, and I wondered how we were going to take over, not just this city, but the whole peninsula. It seemed infeasible.

“Come, disciples. I must hasten to my tower. I fear how much work how has accumulated for me during my trip to the outpost.”

Luniquial lead us to his headquarters. The buildings became denser nearer to the center of the city and sparser near the walls. At the southern edge, open lots provided grazing pasture for horses. Luniquial owned a stone tower that stood in the midst of the fields, one of the surviving buildings from previous iterations of the city. It had been converted into something like a barn, with wooden stalls braced against the stone walls. The tower had a conical roof top with black and white stripes—or more accurately, concentric rings. From a bird’s eye view, it would have looked like a target with a bull’s eye at the center.

“This is where the birds return to when they have message for me. I’ll just check to see–” Luniquial opened the door to the tower’s top floor. About a score of the birds began squawking and fluttering their wings as he entered the room. Some perched on wooden beams, others perched on the sills of the open windows. They had torn open a rabbit hutch and devoured all the animals within, too hungry and impatient to wait for their master to return. “Disciples. Please wait for me below. This may take some time.”

The four of us went outside to wait for the overworked spymaster. Zambulon leaned against a wooden fence. Yurk threw crab apples at the grazing horses, who munched them off the ground. Hwilla giggled at his antics.

“It seems Luniquial will be occupied for a few hours, so I think I’ll step out for a bit. The capital’s shops will let me cross many necessary tools off my long shopping list. Best get to it before all the stores close for the day…”

“Wait right there, Strythe! You’re not going anywhere. Especially not with your penchant for getting lost at inconvenient times. Luniquial gave us an order to wait, and that’s what we’ll do.”

“Sure, but he doesn’t really need all of us. As long as he briefs you, the group’s leader, that will suffice.”

“No chance. I, the group’s leader, forbid it. And what are you planning to do with your tools after you buy them? We don’t know where we’re going next. Do you want to haul a load of chisels and awls across Sandgrave?”

“Ugh. But I’m so close to civilization.” I lifted my hands toward the city’s center, like a man crawling through the a desert would reach out for an oasis shimmering on the horizon. “My tools…”

“Too bad. You can go shopping before we return home.”

Zambulon enjoyed torturing me as revenge for our past interactions. Hwilla was also in a dark mood after my total rejection of her feelings. Our short voyage on the ship had been especially gloomy. And Yurk, well, Yurk was always silent, so he didn’t exactly liven things up for the rest of us. Now we were about to begin a mission completely by ourselves. I dreaded what was to come. At best it would be very uncomfortable. At worst Zambulon might push me off a cliff when no one was watching and claim it was an accident.

The door to the tower burst open. Luniquial rushed out, carrying several scroll cases under one arm. He ran past us down the stone path.

“Master Luniquial?” Zambulon called to him.

“Oh. Right. You four. I have urgent matters to attend to at the palace. I’ll speak with you at the first opportunity, in a day or two. Take lodgings at the Gleeful Bachelor and try to keep a low profile.” He hopped over the fence gate and reiterated “Low profile!” once more before disappearing down the lane.

“There you have it. He’s given us permission to goof off. This is officially a vacation,” I said.

“It is not a vacation. Nor is it a festival, holiday, or carnival. We are on the job, even if we don’t know what that job is yet,” Zambulon said. The three of his junior disciples visibly deflated. Morale was low. He had no choice no choice but to relent. “But… We should use this opportunity to scout around and familiarize ourselves with the capital, so as to better prepared for the future.”

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“Great! I’ll report back to the Gallant Badger or whatever.”

“Stop. The group will not split up. We’ve seen how that ends before. We’ll scout together as a team, and only after we’ve secured our lodgings.”

It looked like I would be shackled and chained to the group. No shopping for me. And no advancing my personal goals either.

I wanted to form a viable escape plan. The Void Phantoms were malicious psychopaths. Every day spent in the citadel endangered my existence. And even if that hadn’t been true, they sent me out on unwholesome and life threatening missions. So the only sensible thing to do was run away when things got too crazy. Because they would eventually send me on missions by myself, I could simply hop on a ship to some far off land and never be seen again. The officers would naturally assume my death to be the reason for my absence. And considering how disorganized the cult was, the disappearance of a young swordsman would not warrant an in depth investigation.

But before my escape, I wanted to prepare myself. First I would learn all I could from the Phantoms about the basics of swordscraft. Then I would gather any materials necessary to start my new life abroad. Already, the ability to make spiritual metal could support me financially, and further advances in my studies would allow me to set up a new shop somewhere far away from Sandgrave and evil cults.

I would have liked to visit the docks again to review the ships at harbor, compare prices for booking passage, and determine the most common ports of call. But doing that with the other disciples around would rouse their suspicions. It would have to wait.

The city was divided into districts, each with its own purpose and type of businesses found therein. Hotels for visitors stood in the entertainment district, along with restaurants, taverns, theaters, music halls, puppet shows, casinos, smoke dens, and a race track for dogs, along with seedier establishments. We had to ask around for directions to the Gleeful Bachelor.

As we walked through the district, our party attracted stares. At first I thought it was because we openly carried swords, but then I realized it was Yurk’s new face. Young girls pointed and stared. They whispered among themselves without realizing that our acute senses let us overhear what they said. Hwilla scrunched up her nose and scowled at them. After years wearing a mask, she had developed a habit of letting all her emotions play across her face, and forgot that people could see her expressions.

We disciples reacted to the sights of the capital based on our own backgrounds. Zambulon hailed from the eastern archipelago, so the city of Nettlewreath was nothing special to him. Hwilla, on the other hand, came from a remote fishing village in a northern colony. The sights and sound of a large city thrilled her. She made us stop at every shop display. And Yurk was Yurk no matter where he was. He acted as at ease here as anywhere. He would have been perfectly satisfied to wait at the foot of the bird tower throwing apples at the horses.

For me, Nettlewreath did not impress with its size or luxury, but did have a number interesting features from an architectural and civic engineering standpoint.

“Zambulon? What’s that hole there?” I asked. Water ran along the street’s gutter and dribbled into a narrow iron grate in the ground.

“That’s a sewer grate, you madman.”

“This town has a sewer?”

“Yes? What of it?”

“Blandwick and Dovestone definitely didn’t have sewers. Is there an access point around here? Let’s go have a look.”

“We are absolutely not doing that. Why would you want to see something so filthy?”

“To see how it works.”

Luniquial’s description of the city’s turbulent history gave me a clue as to how things evolved. The first settlers camped on a low island in the middle of the river. That gave them some safety from the local monster population. In time, the town grew, but storms would cause intermittent flooding. After the last round of destruction, when the locals looked to rebuild the ruins, they decided to lift the new city above the flood line. They hauled in a monstrous amount of clay and earth to raise the island about six meters and make it perfectly round and flat. It must have taken decades to complete.

But they didn’t fill in everything. The ground floors of existing structures were left as the foundations for new buildings. Old buildings like the bird tower had their ground floor changed into a basement. The workers roofed over the old streets, effectively making them the new sewers. Water flowing in from the river slowly carried the raw sewage to the sea. Storms would now flush the whole system with fresh rain water instead of flooding the city.

Exposed bio-sludge under the streets was hardly sanitary, but it was far better than the other towns where people threw it wherever they pleased. And the locals knew enough to draw fresh water from the river, not down stream of the sewage outlets.

“Here we are in the capital’s entertainment district, surrounded by theaters and bordellos, and you want to see the sewers,” Zambulon muttered.

“This district would be a lot less entertaining with everyone keeling over from cholera.”

The quality of entertainment improved as we wandered closer to the heart of the city. At the edge it had local taverns and flophouses and street vendors selling hot food from carts; near the middle it had extravagant theaters painted bright colors and fine restaurants with raised patios overlooking the boulevard.

“I’d love to stop at one of those places and eat some real food again,” Zambulon said. “They import grains from the islands, like wheat and rice, not the awful stuff that grows on the continent. Grit grain, finger corn, funeral grass, muck root, bloated tubers, rat weed. All the crops here taste like dirt.”

“I had noticed that,” I admitted.

Only a few hardy food crops could thrive on the continent. They were bred to withstand harsh weather and poor soil, not for their taste. And those plants had a native resistance to the lunar essences and miasma polluting the land. Trying to grow wheat in Sandgrave would cause it to wither or mutate into something inedible.

“But first things first. To the Gleeful Bachelor.”

At the center of the town was another hill surrounded by a stone wall. The king’s palace rose up from within the complex. This artificially constructed citadel would make for a last line of defense against any invaders that breached the city walls. That had never happened since the reconstruction, and so now the defenses served more to ensure the privacy of the king’s household than keep out armies. Honor guards stood in front of the open gates, dressed in fancy costumes and armed with impractical looking polearms.

Noble families and wealthy citizens strove to gain a place in court, so they built their mansions as near to the palace as they could afford, so as to always be a short step from the king’s audience hall. It was not dissimilar to our cult, but larger and more formal—and also their king couldn’t chop up ghosts. Many grand buildings clustered around city center, while the pearly white marble towers of palace rose above them all.

Our hotel was in this wealthy district, squeezed between a music hall and another building where women leaned from the balconies and waved silk kerchiefs at passersby. They wore a lot of makeup, and their perfume drifted all the way down to the street.

“What’s this place?” I asked.

“Nothing you need to worry about, you womanizer,” Hwilla said. “And that goes for you other two boys as well.” Yurk waved back to one of the balcony girls, and Hwilla pinched his arm as punishment.

The Gleeful Bachelor was a comically narrow building. I could almost reach from one side to the other with my arms. The stairs going up to the upper floors took up a large portion of the building. There was no front desk, like in the Slippery Eel, so the manager came out to greet us in the lobby. Zambulon spoke with the man about the prices for rooms. He obtained one private room for Hwilla and one for the three of us to share.

“I was not expecting to dip into the Student Improvement Fund quite so soon. It’s a good thing I brought extra coins with us, because Luniquial’s grant was not meant to cover stays at luxury hotels.”

We went to look at our room. Calling it luxurious was an overstatement. I would describe it as cramped but clean, and more like a hallway with some beds than an actual room. The Gleeful Bachelor charged premium rates due to its proximity to the king’s palace and the many sorts of entertainment to be had close by. We poked around the room for a minute, needing to squeeze past each other anytime we moved. Our dorm at the Hall of Discipline had three times as much space and more comfortable beds.

Hwilla stuck her head in the door to our room. “Should we go out?”

“Shops are all closed by now,” I said with a shrug.

“Maybe we should rest for the evening and awake at dawn,” said Zambulon.

As he said those words, a rhythmic banging came from the east wall, as if someone on the other side were smashing a piece of wood into it. The voice of a man penetrated the wall, followed by the performative moans of one of the balcony girls, who was apparently named ‘Sweet Djina’. A moment later, the music hall’s first show of the night swung into action. The sounds of drums, zithers, and flutes filtered through the west wall to accompany the vocalists from the east.

We were trapped in the middle. Hwilla blushed and put her hands over her ears.

“On second thought, we might as well do our scouting now. Come on everyone,” Zambulon said. “Let’s have a look around the capital.”

It was going to be a night on the town.