It was a strange feeling, being back home. Faeowynn hadn’t set foot in Ardglas since she left for the Academy three or so years ago. Now she still recognises the crowded streets, the symbols etched into the rocky walls, the scents of cave mildew and draught-beaten cold stone, the old shadowed alleyways that were like watering holes for beggars and the street-corners where the urchin children cheer one another on in their ratty fistfights. But now she walks these ways not in the torn white dress of her youth, but in the buttoned-up blue uniform of a junior lieutenant, and that rapscallion Penny that would haunt her side like the most faithful bodyguard is here no longer, but far away at the side of a different lieutenant, in distant Torain.

Distant Torain, packed under sheets of clean white snow.

I’m going to kill Klara.

First snows only fall once a year, and now of all times, she must be left behind in the draughty caverns of Ardglas. Here, there is no snow, and under the kilometres’ worth of insulating rock and stone, only occasionally do the frigid winds of winter blow their way through the caves, through the wide tunnels on the rooftops among the stalactites, and aerate the stuffy city-layers with crisp, breathable air.

Still… she’s here for a reason.

“Recognise this place?” Faeowynn chirps. Her hands are in the pockets of her suit-pants, and Rhys’s hand is wound tight around the nook of her arm, to not lose her. Especially at the bottom levels, Ardglas grows impossibly packed with souls. The shabby buildings pack tightly against one-another, with storeys that loom across the streets and connect together by rickety throws of gangplanks and ropes that blot out the view of the cave-ceiling. And through the narrow, winding streets, hundreds of weary souls crowd snugly together, rushing like water through a mountain stream.

“Yes, ma’am,” replies Rhys. Which is quite strange, given Rhys never grew up in Ardglas.

“Mhm.” the junior lieutenant nods. She pauses, for a moment, as the man ahead of them stops himself in the middle of the road to retch forward and cough. About a dozen other people bump into them from behind, and ultimately she drags Rhys around the side through the crowd. She feels a hand reaching towards her pocket, only to touch her wrist - and the pickpocket quickly retreats. “Stonecutter’s Basin, this neighbourhood. There’s a pub, not far from here, that serves drinks to anyone who asks. Forgot what it’s called. Do you remember?”

“Yes, ma’am,” answers Rhys again, but doesn’t actually say its name.

“We should go there sometime after we finish business around here. I wonder if their beer is still as awful. Penny and I would sneak there every once in a while and put together whatever money we could scrounge up,” Faeowynn continues, staring far ahead.

She’s not tall enough to see over the heads in the crowd - not the way Rhys is, who doesn’t even need a stepladder to change a lightbulb - but every once in a while through the sea of greasy overcoats or sweaty miner’s sleeveless shirts, the buttery hues of the gaslamps light the upcoming junction. There, the road leads down into the farthest depths of Ardglas, where people dreg on roads like Ratseye Avenue or Heartcross Tenements; or leads farther above, up a set of glistening cobbled steps and to one of the pneumatic service-elevators, bound upwards for the strata above.

“Do you have a favourite beer, private?” Faeowynn asks, and starts to quietly lead Rhys farther to the side, to take the turn once they do reach the junction without bumping into too many people on the opposite side of the road.

“Yes, ma’am,” answers Rhys.

“I never took you for a drinker,” says Faeowynn. She already knew that he wasn’t paying attention. But sometimes she did simply enjoy talking to herself. Having someone there to ‘listen’ made her feel less awkward about it. “I’m partial to cider, myself.”

She pauses, suddenly, when the crowd parts ahead of them. A few roaches dash by, howling with laughter - kids probably half her age, the tallest among them probably a head shorter than her, dressed in oversized dirty clothes. She spots the glint of something shiny streaking through the air, dancing between their grimy fingers as they pass it among themselves. They make their way through the crowd and lose themselves soon enough, and moments later, another figure rushes by: this one of a blue-coated constable giving chase.

Faeowynn makes a brief chuckle, and finally Rhys seems to snap back to reality.

“Excuse me,” the tall man looks down at her, as she starts to usher him forward again. “I… didn’t catch that last part.”

“Hm? Oh, nothing, nothing. Honestly, I was getting worried you weren’t listening to me.”

“Ah, never, miss lieutenant. Never, of course.” He blinks and makes a polite nod, and with his free hand he lifts up his dark red scarf a bit more, then dips his chin underneath it to cover his mouth and nose for some warmth. It’s not as frigid as the lands above - but Ardglas gets pretty cold, too. “Where, exactly, are we going?”

“Back above, to Wyvern’s Hollow,” answers Feowynn. “We just took a long detour, I wanted to see the dregs of Ardglas again.”

“Ah, I see. Of course, miss lieutenant.”

It’s a small, narrow service-elevator, girded by bronze and steel pillars that stretch from the ground all the way to the roof of the cavern, where they melt into the matrix of support beams that keep the walls from crumbling. The masses of people aren’t expected to ride things like these - they are pointed to the broad spiral staircases constructed into the stalagmite spires, or to the inclined roads carved into the outside walls of the cavern, corkscrewing around the vast hollow multiple times to allow carriages and cars a gentle enough angle to not go careening down into the rocks.

A brief flash of the junior lieutenant insignia on her beret is enough to grant them entrance, and their boots clatter on the metal floor. The doors shut, and the hissing pneumatics start to propel them upwards.

“Oh, by the way: catch.”

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

Rhys blinks in silence, and only after a moment he jolts in realisation and tenses up. The lanky man stumbles to grab a glinting bronze badge after it hits his chest.

“Miss lieutenant?” he asks. When the shock wears off, he examines it, uses a felt-gloved finger to polish its surface: Royal Constabulary of Ardglas, featuring the carefully-engraved image of the great Hollow Mountain at the top, the skyline Ardglas’ top at its feet, and below it the two gargantuan caverns that make up the majority of the city proper. He looks up at Faeowynn, afterwards, and sees the proud smirk on her pale face. Rhys didn’t notice how deftly she snagged that glint of bronze out of the air earlier in the crowd, and it seems that neither did the urchins or constable.

“It’s a game on Ratseye Avenue,” she explains. The elevator makes a rattle. Outside, through a foggy porthole, the sight of black rooftops and distant spires reinforced with steel supports is contrasted against the faraway wall of the cavern, shrouded in greenish-black fog pockmarked by tunnels and mines that dig far into the stone. “Played by the urchin children on their way to become pickpockets. They say that the best test to suss out an upcoming master thief is whether or not they can snatch the badge right off a constable. Whoever manages it gets to boast as much as they want.” She carefully plucks it out of Rhys’s palm for a moment, looking at her reflection on the polished surface, before setting it back down into his bewildered hand. “And gets to be called the Thief-King by their friends. At least, until the next person does it, and then they suddenly stop being the snazziest bee on the block.”

“I see.” Nods Rhys, though it remains clear he still doesn’t quite know what to do with the stolen thing. Faeowynn gives him a glance over the rims of her black spectacles that gives him goosebumps, and then a chuckle.

“I’ll be on my way to Wyvern’s Hollow to sort out our business,” she explains, crossing her arms and shifting her weight to one foot. “You can go ahead and take that to the nearest constabulary. Say it was lost or something. And on your way back, buy me a pack of cigarettes, too.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you know the sergeant?”

“Hm? Yes.”

“She had so many of these badges, she said one day she’d get them melted down into a crown, so she can truly be the Thief-Queen.”

“That’s a mighty story, miss lieutenant. I presume she never got the chance to.”

“No, she didn’t.”

Part of her enjoyed Ardglas assignments.

Well, perhaps ‘enjoyed’ was too strong a word, but certainly preferred the city’s administrative hoops to those found everywhere else. In all of Lwenn, where the rich nobility sent their prestige-hungry sons to fill the ranks of the army’s officers, there was always a spider’s web of sticky, invisible silk to weave through, or else get irreparably stuck in. When every captain, every major, every other lieutenant bears the name of one of the kingdom’s illustrious families, doing business with them was like walking blindfolded through a minefield: a game of knowing whose hands to shake, whose rings to kiss, who to pretend she knew and who to pretend she couldn’t stand, who to flaunt her own noble d’Arlons name to and who to only introduce herself merely as ‘junior lieutenant Faeowynn’ to. A single wrong move, a single ireful half-glance or unpleasant rumour uttered against the wrong ear, and she’d get hooked into that red silk for days -- weeks -- at a time, until she’d at last manage to honey up the right person, or perhaps be cut loose by a different spider… all while the rest of the platoon, oft far away, would be sending haggard, desperate pleas across telegraph and telephone for her to hurry up with whatever favour, supply-order or information they needed her to get.

It was a game too precise for Lieutenant Holloway to play. She couldn’t stand the stuffy suits, the perfumed salons, the honeyed whiskey or the handshakes and cheek-kisses. And the other lieutenants themselves couldn’t stand trying to play their waltz with an uncouth warhound of the new nobility. But that was fine. That was Faowynn’s job, and she danced through that silken web like a praying mantis in spider’s chitin.

Every once in a while, though, it grew taxing, the game and all its ever-changing steps; the Joyes hated the Glovers, the Glovers loved the Dubois, the Dubois couldn’t stand the Farringways or Karrigangs, who could never make up their mind between loathing or praising the Blackmoors. It was a tree of many gilded branches, and keeping track of them all was a job too demanding for anyone in the platoon but her to understand.

Ardglas and its army-offices was always a palette cleanser. Here, in the dark caverns where the kingdom mines its ores and the underground refineries churn out their steel, there was no room for nobles. No room for country houses, grand estates or splendorous castles in the vast black maw of the earth, and on the surface where the glorious radiance beaming down from the Mountain struck the hills, there were the diacordite temples of the Cult of Sol and all its cranky clergymen. No, in the realm of steam and iron, hewn in the stone bowels of the Hollow Mountain, the only divine right to rule is capital, and here it was the tycoons of Ardglas’ industrial heart that gained their stripes and chevrons in His Majesty’s New Home Army.

No courtly etiquette, no social graces, no false friends or fake smiles or old family feuds. Only the language of new money: alcohol and gambling, cursing and dancing, laurels and parties. After all the stuffy work topside, the simple thought of it makes her want to lick her lips.

“Lieutenant?”

“Hm-?” She blinks and snaps back to reality. The elevator had stopped, and they walked out to let the handful of disgruntled street-workers in. They’re on the slick cobbled roads of the upper caverns.

“Were you by chance not listening, miss lieutenant?” Rhys tilts his head, and with his height, it looks like the lamp of a streetlight gone crooked. His scarf does well to hide his knowing smile.

“D…don’t you start giving me lip now, private,” Faeowynn makes a flustered scoff, adjusting her black spectacles. “Now, what did you say?”

“What cigarettes would you like, miss lieutenant?”

“For me, buy a pack of Temlin’s. Cheapest one you can find. And for later, get a pack of Moratti Premiums - if you can snag two, actually, that’d be grand.”

“I’m afraid I am… not made of laurels, miss lieutenant,” Rhys says, in a slightly awkward tone of voice.

Faeowynn grabs him by the nook of his arm and pulls him off to the side slightly, into an alley off the main road to not plug up the traffic. The upper caverns are less crowded than the lowermost points; here the houses aren’t tenements packed against one another like sardine cans, but proper brick apartments. Run down, of course, most of them, with cracked windows and boarded doors, but not the squalid hives of the miners. Here dwell the factory and refinery workers, who can afford something a smidge better.

“Here you go.” The lieutenant leans a hand deep into her navy overcoat and pulls out a thick leather wallet. She extracts a few bluish banknotes, and then a couple more for good measure, and hands them all over to Rhys. “Should be enough for the cigarettes with more to spare. If you want anything, you can go ahead and get it too.”

“Oh my. Generous, miss lieutenant, thank you,” mutters the man, who bundles up the notes and cautiously hides them in an inner pocket. He pats himself down, looks around, and then hides them in an even deeper pocket. Can never be too careful with one’s money around here.

“Don’t start with that.” Faeowynn waves a hand dismissively. “Get going, now. I’ll meet you in front of the main administration building at the Hollow when you’re done.”

“Yes, miss lieutenant.” Rhys salutes, and like a ghost the tall man blends into the swarming crowd.