The exercise became one of following Addrion’s emerald armor and verdant hair, beckoning us in the breeze like the banners that flapped above the walls and the spire. Her steps never faltered. The citizens of Ludopolis gave her a wide berth, polarized and repelled like iron filings to the wrong side of a magnet. (What? I watch children’s science shows at times when Lisa is out of the house.) Wanderers into her path often skidded to a halt and took a step back, be they humanoid or otherwise.
As we threaded like needles through the city streets, it was hard to know which direction we were facing in an absolute sense, but easy to know which direction we were in relation to the spire, which was nearly always visible. At times it passed behind tall commercial buildings, noisy housing rising many floors high, or an overpass, a foot-bridge enabling pedestrians and small vehicles to cross perpendicular to the busy thoroughfare below. Like the maze marble, we left and right, following our green-haired guide, ever toward the center.
“What’s with all the goat decorations?” asked Zideo, observing the doors of houses and places of business, where trinkets hung or were nailed. Elaborate masks, carven heads, stamped plates depicting the heads of goats were set out. Goat statuettes, of wood or tin I supposed, guarded porches and railings. Horns curled, ears flopped, tongues lolled. Some were meant to terrify with protruding teeth and evil eyes, others sported comical grins.
“The festival is tomorrow,” said Kriegsgeswinnler. “So much opportunity. I should have set up shop here. It’s just… so much competition.”
“Boo!” shouted a blocky, jagged-edged child holding a horned mask in front of her face. She menaced us with pretend hooves and threatened to butt Helmgarth. The child was of that peculiar variety of flat personage that I have seen so much of in Ludopolis which always faces the eye, like a cardboard cutout of a person that never turns. Certainly I could see her side or back if she chose to turn herself, but the cardboard (so to speak) was always oriented toward me. Looking back, I expect she was always facing everyone. (Dog readers, you can simply ignore this part. I’ve explained it as best I can.)
“Don’t you mean baa?” said Zideo. Classic Zideo, right there. Always ready with something clever. Not everyone can claim having a human this witty, and I expect that is why he is so adept at Doing A Stream.
Addrion sent the child running with a glance. Her back faced us, rapidly shrinking as she fled between two ramshackle vendor stalls advertising meats, and she dropped her mask.
“What’s the… ahem,” said Zideo, blanching. He looked around, presumably to see if the book was coming. “Tell me more about that,” he said in a low voice.
Helmgarth maneuvered around a highly articulated and very human-looking human wearing a toque blanche, who shoved a wide platter of steaming pastries into his face. Seeing Helmgarth, he said, “You’re a sweetroll guy, right? I’ve got sweetrolls.” He pointed toward his table on the other side of the street, packed with breads. Personally, I have never seen the purpose of grain-based food, but as a dog, I have also never turned one down, and have on occasion stolen one. I’m not too proud to admit that.
The seneschal’s face darkened. “I don’t eat sweetrolls just because I hail from… ugh, forget it.” He decided it’s not worth it. “Begone, bread-monger.” He drew his trowel.
“Whoa, buddy,” said Zideo, pulling the seneschal away by the elbow. “Not worth it!” Helmgarth stared the chef down as he Zideo drew him back into Addrion’s wake. “Wow!” he said. “Wowie wow. You uh… you got a little bit country there for a minute.”
Helmgarth snapped out of it, and returned to the task at hand. He sheathed his trowel, as it were, in his belt. “Apologies,” he said.
“Time for some box breathing.” Zideo demonstrated, sucking in air slowly and noisily through his teeth, blowing it back out through puckered lips.
“Get your head right!”
“I’m fine, m’lord” said Helmgarth. “Your servant becomes… excitable… when reduced in such a way.” He took a deep breath and released it.
“The festival is… two festivals, in actuality.” It seemed to me that Helmgarth’s eyes quickly glanced around to see who was listening, although I could not imagine being spied upon in all the building, selling, wailing and begging. “Tomorrow, the Fête of Fate will be celebrated, when all citizens and residents of Ludopolis come together to look forward to that which will be.”
“What does that have to do with goats?” asked Zideo.
“Nothing whatsoever,” said Helmgarth. A young woman in a yellow shirt and suspenders waved at us, pointing at her food offerings. She was set up on a fallen stone slab, to the obvious envy of her neighboring vendors. A makeshift grill was behind her, billowing delectable plumes of irresistible aromas. I was drawn to the roasted meats she displayed, seasoned and smoking.
“The Fête of Fate is a fanciful day that features feasts, feats and fables. The tonight is Fate’s Eve, the night of Remembrance, which-”
“Which is all goats?”
“-formed in the shadow of the Fête, honoring our founding fathers.”
Zideo snapped his head toward Helmgarth. “You have founding fathers, too?”
Helmgarth nodded.
“We have those where I come from!” He seemed genuinely excited. “Ours had… some ideas, and some… other ideas. What were yours like?”
“Our stories differ,” said Helmgarth, “and there are many. Indeed, for a night of Remembrance, it is although the memory itself is corrupted.” He eyed the smoking meats on the slab, and I think he would have stopped there if Addrion had not expected us to follow. “The city was founded by RAMulus and ROMus, wandering heroes of a mythic time. Suckled by a she-”
“Goat?”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“-eep.”
“Oh, come on.” Said Zideo. He threw his hands over his head. “When do the goats come in?”
I noticed movement above us on the edge of my vision. A white lump darted along the rooftops, leaping and flipping ostentatiously. So we were being watched after all.
“The goats are only symbolic,” said Helmgarth, obviously lying.
A procession of dancers in goat masks barged down the street against the flow of traffic. People leered, jeered, and moved out of the way. A dancer collided with the baker in the toque, spilling his baked goods to the dusty ground. They quarreled, the baker yelling and red-faced, the dancer baaing at him to the cheers of onlookers before returning to the procession. The baker shook his fist at them, then dusted off his loaves and pastries and set them back on the tray and offering to other newly arrived refugees.
“This place is bonkers,” said Zideo.
Addrion’s head was looking up now. The spire was no longer in the distance, but above us. Kriegsgeswinnler shielded his eye from dust displaced from the grout in its masonry. Now that we were closer, I could see that I was not mistaken about its uprightness. Unlike its erect counterpart on the golden coin that Zideo had mysteriously produced, it slouched and leaned, slunk like a serpent reluctantly upward. A lattice of supports and buttresses held up the segments leaning too far out, creating exposed undersides where moss and rot flourished. Water dripped from its stone bulges. I was reminded of the silly game that Lisa and Zideo and Krystal would play during Krystal’s visit, which involved stacking wooden blocks, tactically removing them and replacing them on the top, creating a highly vulnerable structure. This looked like that. Even a dog knows that towers are not supposed to sway with the breeze.
More guardsmen with the starlight-colored sashes stood at the entrance to the tower—one woman with short hair and bandages around her knuckles, who continually threw fast jabs into the air, pummeling virtual opponents with a flurry of quick strikes, and a halberdier with a hat so fluffy it could have been a dog bed. He looked to the boxer, who looked to Addrion, then clasped her hands behind her back. The two stepped aside wordlessly.
Beneath the tower was the Lower Court, where the foundation of the tower was puzzled over (or, I should say, beneath) by personages of office, peacekeeping guardspersons, and construction folk clustered around cracking columns or leaking pipework. I was unused to seeing so little structure at the base of a building. A staircase with tattered carpet spiraled out of the center, where a stern child stood in enormously oversized shoes and spiky hair.
“What the heck is holding this place up?” Zideo whispered.
Helmgarth gave my human a very serious look. “Ludopolis is nothing if not resilient, m’lord.”
“Listen close,” said Addrion, looking anywhere but at Zideo. “Let’s get one thing straight. Mind your words in the presence of her majesty.” She jabbed toward his chin with a green gloved finger. Although I was thankful her weapon was not out, it bothered me that her finger came closer to him with every point. “You call her that—your majesty. Or your highness. You answer questions, you don’t ask them. And if you bring that book out…” Addrion glanced at his pockets as though she could confiscate it, but it seemed to exist nowhere until he called it up with a question.
“Then I send you out of the tower the fast way.”
She clapped her visor back over her face, spread her arms while still staring down my human. The weight of her eye contact was heavy, but she turned into green energy and vanished up the stairs in an instant.
“Wow,” said Kriegsgeswinnler. “We’ll walk, don’t worry about us.”
“Welp,” said Zideo.
The spiky-haired, big-shoed kid stood in our path at the base of the stairway.
“She’s expecting us,” said Helmgarth. The youth said nothing, but their eyes drew over us. They turned and began to climb.
Helmgarth followed, the wooden stairs creaking beneath his weight. The merchant rattled along behind him. Zideo blew out air from his cheeks. I wanted to go ahead of him, but I followed.
The wooden stairs were wide and soon gave way to a cramped stone stairwell. Upward we coiled through candlelit darkness. We past slit-shaped archer windows through which the light of the Screenwilds slashed, dragging across our bodies before we plunged back into darkness. The irregular rhythm was such that my eyes never had time to get used to the dark, and each light gave me a headache. The spiral staircase broke off, continuing several feet away, and we were compelled to leap across. The youth did so with ease, and the merchant with some difficulty. Zideo and I had no trouble with it beyond the anxiety of discovering a broken staircase, but Helmgarth, laden with wares and creatures, had to be hauled across. His feet slipped, and dangled in the dark for one long, uncertain moment, before I grabbed his sleeve in my jaws and reeled him back to solid ground. An entire step broke beneath him as his feet scrabbled for purchase, clattering against stone far below.
“Y’all need upkeep,” observed Zideo.
We continued upward, squeezing upward through the throat of the tower. Stone creaked on stone, and wood strained. The entire floor beneath us tilted, just enough that a current of fear ran through all of us except for the young person, who smelled utterly calm and did not turn back. The stairwell terminated in a short hallway, and although we thought for a moment we had reached the top, it picked back up several feet down the hall.
“Y’all need to straighten this bad boy out,” said Zideo.
The final stretch of the stairwell was the darkest, and delivered us to a circular room, a one-sided hallway. Along the stone walls hung candles that flickered in the draft, and old paintings of stoic women in formal gowns. I could make out their eyes, although I venture that Zideo could not, and their eyes looked out from those paintings conveying something hopeful—but not the encouraging kind of hope, not optimism, rather the spine-tensing uncertainty of what is to be. A seated woman in an overwrought pink dress was even crossing her fingers. What artist thought this to be an appropriate message for royal portraits is beyond my canine purview. If the moment calls for it, I can discuss squeaky toys at length; human(oid) art is quite another world.
One door was already open. An island of faint, multicolored light spilled out from its entrance. The youth walked over to it and glared at us in a way that said we were expected, if not welcome.
It was a library bathed in rainbow. Bookshelves, swollen with tomes both small and large, thick and thin, lined the walls. Addrion was kneeling, glowing beneath the prismatic illumination and no longer perceptible as green. The rainbow streamed in from an enormous stained-glass window above, a panoply of color even to my canine eye: beams of garnet, citrine, amethyst and sapphire twinkled across the room. The window itself showed the profile of a woman in a dress and a tall, pointed hat.
“My lady,” said Addrion, loudly. “It is I… me.” Addrion’s eyes were open as she stared at the floor, and she cleared her throat. “Addrion. Your… uh, servant. We bring news.”
Wind blew noisily across the archway at the end of the room, through which I could see a handrail and moving clouds, and hear the hubbub of construction and refugees below.
The woman from the stained glass window above appeared in the archway. She had the same flowing locks of white hair, the same gown the color of starlight, but in addition to this, she wore a coat with rolled-up sleeves made from the material I recognized from Zideo’s blue jeans—denim, which I had happily gnawed many times—and mirror sunglasses. Addrion looked back with pursed lips, and made an irascible, downward motion with her gauntlet, indicating that we should kneel (or rather, should already have done so). We did, and I bowed my head, which I think was going the extra mile in all honesty. My human lingered the longest before lowering himself to one knee, imitating Addrion.
The woman in the archway regarded us, so still that I was afraid she had been frozen by my human’s book. She reached up and removed a cigarette from her mouth, breathing out a whisper of smoke that dissipated instantly in the same blowing wind that made the tower creak and sway. She flicked it over the parapet, and it was taken by that wind.