Hugh was having a very bad day.

It was typical that Hugh's life existed at the mercy of the Chamberlain. Hugh was nominally in the service of the kitchen, but was cursed with a recognizably diligent character and a rather acute sense of balance. These two traits meant Hugh (to his dismay) was frequently selected as a serving boy when hands were short.

In his wildest fantasies Hugh dreamed of dropping a tray and being returned to pure kitchen duties, never to be caught between the Chef and the Chamberlain ever again. Fear of the consequences inspired his nightmares.

To fear the Chamberlain was natural, to not fear him would be a sign of madness. He was a man who possessed an infinite capacity for cruelty, a perfect awareness of all failures of personal grooming (and delighted in addressing them through public humiliation).

But for all the horrors of being forced to walk through the kitchens, wearing his stained pants on his head, the punishments and powers of the Chamberlain remained within the realm of humans... until last night.

Hugh didn’t know how the lamp had gotten under his feet, but the events that followed had strained his soul. The Chamberlain’s movement between the kitchen and the study, his confusing orders, the flicker in Hugh’s vision that occurred when he was near... Hugh flinched from considering it all to preserve his own sanity.

Then this morning the Page, Hero, had spoken to him in the Chamberlain's voice—knowing things only he could know.

Hugh did not question the reasons for revealing these abilities, or the purpose of the tasks. He had been told not to think. He was taking this imposition very seriously. But, try as he might, niggling thoughts were beginning to creep into his awareness—pockets of cognition sprouting up regardless of his desperate attempts to crush them.

----------------------------------------

I was getting a little worried about Hugh. Without the form of the Chamberlain shaping my thoughts I recognized that I had stretched the thread of his sanity, it ran the risk of becoming...frayed. He had been extremely quiet since I had requisitioned him, but I took hope that his eye—the fabulous barometer of his mental state—was only twitching once very few seconds. He was doing exactly as I asked by guiding me through the keep and into the surrounding township. I resolved to not make the sleeping dogs drink—My train of thought derailed, what was I trying to say here? Turns of phrase occasionally came to me that seemed... not quite right. I shook myself clear of the unproductive thought, I would try not to test Hugh much further. There, a nice clear meaning without ambiguity. Idioms, I'll throw them out with the bathwater.

I had already procured a pair of boots, a foresight that payed off the second we stepped out of the keep. The perpetual drizzle and mist penetrated clothing with ease, and I was glad for the water proofing that my feet enjoyed. It was the sort of day where you could see leagues in every direction so long as you walked the whole way, and I said as much to Hugh.

"You can see leagues in this fog?" he said with what I suppose was awe.

"No Hugh, it's... never-mind. Let's go."

We descended into the bailey—the walled town clustered around the foot of the motte, the hill the keep rested upon. I interrogated Hugh with light questions about the layout and setup of the area. Within the bailey the buildings were made of stone—which also served as the name, Stonetown—I presumed even treated wood rotted in a matter of months. I learned that it was inhabited almost entirely by the families of servants and tradesmen who directly supplied the keep with goods and services.

Over the course of our journey I spotted the vast assembly of labourers that threw their lives into the Keep’s insatiable furnace. Washer women sang bawdy songs while throwing wardrobes worth of linen into boiling water, their cracked and red hands diving into the chemical suds with abandon.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Boys orchestrated vast flocks of geese, chickens, ducks, and the occasional guardswan through the streets, and I could track the time of their passage by how mud-trodden the clouds of loose down had become.

Bedraggled street-cleaners with hollow eyes observed all, wincing every time a goose took a shit, but more often glancing at the tide of mud that moved ever upward, carried step by step in what must be an endless war.

They were, as Hugh put it, ‘good Townies, who don't deserve nuthin' 'orrible to 'appen’.

"Will any of them be selected as rebel leaders?"

"Oh no! Townies never rebelled, least, not in the Barony. They're not from here, they weren't born in the mud. Can you believe that when the kingdom first integrated these lands they brought all the trappings of civilization? Bathhouses, good stone houses, real crops, all given to them for naught but a promise of allegiance! And what did they do? Rebellion after rebellion until they finally got put in their place, well now they get none of it. Serves ‘em right."

I was beginning to understand the makeup of this place. Elskia might have something to her ‘improve the lot of the people’ inclinations. Regardless, I understood now where I must go.

The rebel leaders would be found outside of the fortifications of Stonetown. I needed to leave the bailey and venture into the maze of dirt tracks, crude cottages, and muck fields. We were headed for Mudtown.

The first thing I noticed about Mud Town was the mud. The next dozen things I noticed were also mud or mud related, but those came as aftershocks of the initial noticing, the ‘Big One’ notice, which, as previously stated, was the mud.

It was everywhere. It was all the typical places you'd expect to see mud: path, field, hems of clothing, footwear, etc, noteworthy only insofar as the quantity of mud beggared belief. But further, the mud was in places I wouldn't expect to see mud. Even further, it was places I didn't understand how it could be.

I saw a man with an axe split a piece of wood, and out of the split flowed a dark sludge which the woodsman shook it off with a gesture so practised it could only have been borne from thousands of hours of repetition.

A child ran by me, paused, and horked from their nostril a quantity of muck that in any other instance would have seemed life threatening. They ran on cheerily, and I absently noted that their shot had unerringly inscribed a rude word upon my boot.

"Right then. Time to get serious."

Hugh shivered.

Elskia was utterly unsuited for the kind of browbeating (and grime exposure) this trial demanded. Her plan to get the leaders to come to her was utterly naive: Even if they surrendered I'm sure they expected a bit of ‘grievous injury’; it was after all, traditional. The rebel's best interest was to hide and hope to win the game by never being found and so dodge the beating. Just common sense, and trying to persuade them otherwise wouldn’t be easy.

But if I could impersonate one of them and surrender to Elskia directly, that would be the proof they needed that she was earnest. The rest would race to her to avoid the fate offered by Roderick's far less gentle hand.

For all of this to work I just need needed to find one of the leaders, and that meant going undercover.

----------------------------------------

Hugh watched nervously as the Chamberlain (in the form of Hero the Page) approached a mudman loitering at his hovel. Hugh was too distant to hear the words they exchanged, but after a few minutes the pair of them entered the dingy abode.

The whole journey here had been horrible. Hugh had needed to do two layers of thinking at once, significantly more than the one he was used to and dangerously exceeding the zero he had been told to do.

The first layer was spent pretending everything was normal, that this journey was simply an outing with Hero, whom he had never had significant interaction with until this very morning.

The second layer was spent answering all of the questions that Hero asked, as quickly and clearly as he could.

But there was a third layer bubbling in the back of Hugh's mind, a layer so secret and dangerous that no part of him could acknowledge it’s existence (and not just because it was definitely a third strike against the no thoughts rule).

The third layer was wondering what was actually going on. But this layer was so discreet that it's existence could only be known when, every so often, things that he noticed were being shuttled away to a part of his mind that was pretending very hard not to exist.

The mudman left his home alone and lurched through the mud over to Hugh, no doubt to convey an order from the Chamberlain, a part of Hugh felt faint hope that it would be a release back to the keep.

"Come along boy," the mudman rasped and turned deeper into the fields.

Hugh stood outraged. The impertinence—imagine, talking that way to a keep resident—when the mudman turned back to look at Hugh with a sly smile, "having thoughtsss are we Hugh?"

The world flickered, that damn twitch in his eye acting up again, and he began to follow. Another thought made it's way inexorably into the third layer.