Niklas spent several days with the Sommerfeldts. He slept most of the time on the cot as his fever died down. As the heat finally dissipated, his body ached horribly. While awake, he spent his time in the small apartment. He tried his best to learn anything he could from inside, where he was safe from the Relrin Mothers, who seemed to always be outside in the compound courtyard.
He asked fewer questions, deciding to learn by observation. Anything he said to the Sommerfeldts either offended them or left them confused. He wasn’t trying to be rude. They just seemed to have different expectations when it came to conversation.
He quickly learned that he couldn’t live under the same roof as Lill and her family without at least a little interaction with her. So he kept his dealings with her to a minimum, answering questions with as few words as possible and never looking at her directly if he could avoid it. That ended up being more daunting than he thought it would be. He always felt an unwelcome tension when he knew she was around.
Niklas tried his best to help around the house but could tell he weighed heavily on the generosity of a rankless slave unit. He suspected they weren’t getting extra rations for him but were dividing their portions to accommodate him. He finally decided he needed to get away and find out what he could about getting his mark removed.
Niklas found Ivar sitting on a broken stool in the kitchen, chewing a chewing stick idly, probably lost in some mischievous thought. “Ivar,” he asked the wiry, slouched man.
Ivar raised a sharp eyebrow at Niklas in response.
“Where can I find an esthetic operator?”
Ivar laughed a strange snort-laugh. “I only know of one in all Soutfel. That would be Dr. Geoffrey. What, you realized you’re too ugly?”
Niklas rolled his eyes as such comments were common from Ivar. He seemed to be trying to compete with Niklas’ frankness. “Where do I find him?”
“Town,” he said simply, as though that clarified anything whatsoever.
“Do you think you can take me?”
Ivar laughed – a real laugh this time. “No, I can’t, devil boy. I’m leaving with the herdsmen this morning, and besides, there’s no way you could afford Dr. Geoffrey.”
Niklas suppressed a growl and rubbed his temple as his present headache reminded him that it was there. Maybe he could ask Tord. Ivar explained that Tord was Lill’s husband. Husband wasn’t a word that Niklas was familiar with. If Tord wouldn’t help Niklas find an Esthetic Artificer, maybe Frode would.
Ivar, seemingly sensing Niklas’ thoughts, cut in. “The other guys are also busy. Why don’t you get over yourself and ask Lill to take you? She’s going into town soon.”
Niklas paled at the idea, and Ivar saw it.
“I don’t get you, devil boy. It’s not like she’s going to bite. Why are you so scared of her?”
“I’m not scared!” Niklas snapped.
Ivar raised his sharp eyebrow again as though to say Niklas’ response confirmed his suspicion.
“I just...want to be respectful,” Niklas explained, but inwardly, he knew he shied away from her as if she was glowing iron.
“Right…” Ivar said doubtfully. “I don’t know about your demon woods, but here, avoiding people is weird and rude. It’s not respectful.”
Niklas restrained a retort, Ivar had a point. Lill seemed increasingly irritated at Niklas’ behavior. Whenever he scampered to the other room as she entered, she looked angry, not flattered.
Lill pushed open the front door and started gathering baskets for her run to town. The scabs on Niklas’ back felt taught as he bit back his instinct to leave the room.
He coughed loudly before turning to her. “Mother Lill,” he said with as much reverence as he could manage.
Lill gasped in surprise before turning to him. This was the first time he initiated any conversation with her. He forced himself to look at her but kept his head bowed.
“So he talks!” she cried. “And not just to the boys. Why am I good enough for words now, boy?”
“I meant no offense,” Niklas stammered. “I’m beginning to see you have different customs here.”
“I should hope so!” she barked with a laugh. “I don’t want to know what social rules you’ve learned in hell forest your whole life!”
"Will you forgive me?" Niklas stammered, realizing he needed to be on her good side.
"Will you forgive me?" Niklas stammered, realizing he needed to be on her good side. If the esthetic operator couldn't remove Niklas' scar, his backup plan would be to take Mother Lill back to Pit, and maybe he could be reintegrated as a drone. Convincing her to return with him would be impossible if he continued to offend her.
“I think...I need to learn acceptable social conduct here.”
She snorted. “I’d say. Lesson one, you had best stop with this ‘Mother’ nonsense. Suppose you go around accusing every woman of being your own mother. In that case, you’re going to have some confused and angry men looking for you.”
Niklas nodded, still feeling hesitant to use too many words. “I understand, Mother.”
She narrowed her eyes at him.
“I mean Lill.”
“What were you going to ask me, dear?”
Niklas stammered, still feeling jittery that he was speaking to a mother so openly. “I, uh, was wondering if you were going to town?” he asked dumbly.
“Yes, dear. I could use some help if yer willing to carry stuff.”
“Yes, yes!” he cried, excited for the opportunity to serve a Mother. “You shouldn’t have to carry anything.”
She grinned at that. “I say...I think I like this new Niklas. Some others...” She shot an accusing glare at Ivar. “...should take note!”
Niklas gratefully took the basket from her hands. Helping and obeying a Mother like a Zealot felt good.
“Shall we go then?”
Niklas nodded emphatically.
She led him into the compound courtyard, where the twelve apartments with adjoining walls faced. Today, seven Relrin mothers worked in the common area.
Niklas held his breath, trying his best not to look at them. The Relrin mothers were so alien. They mostly had jet-black hair and brown eyes. They wore simple, plain, dirty work robes or dresses, as Rasmus had explained. Niklas tightened his fists. Apparently, women worked here. In fact, it seemed that they were considered inferior to men in many ways. It didn’t matter that they were the Mothers of the enemy. He wasn’t okay with it. It made him hate the Relrin men all the more.
“Who’s this?” a woman cried to Lill.
“The Pit man finally showing his face to the sun?” another Mother chimed, and the others laughed. Niklas looked down at Lill’s heels, not wanting to see them. It had taken him a week to bring himself to even look at Lill. He wasn't ready to freely break all of the Mother codes.
“He follows you like a debtbond!”
“The debtbond of a debtbond can you imagine?”
Niklas looked up, expecting Lill to be fuming, but instead, she was laughing. “Now you watch yourself, or I’ll set him on you!” She smirked, and the others squealed in simultaneous terror and delight at the thought.
“What’s wrong with him? Is he dumb?” another asked, and Niklas made the mistake of meeting her eyes.
Niklas froze. She wasn’t as old as Mother Lill. She might have even been close to his age. Her large hazel eyes drew him out of his mind and held him suspended in an undefinable moment. Her lighter eyes paired with her hair, which had streaks of blonde that suggested mixed non-Relrin heritage. Niklas muttered something, not intelligible words but involuntary sounds. Niklas' hands clutched the basket and drew it tight to his chest on their own accord. Surely, this was the reason drones didn’t look upon mothers.
No!
Niklas ripped his eyes from hers, growling at himself in anger. What had just happened? Did mothers somehow have the means to enchant drones? Maybe the reason the priests issued the commandment was more practical than spiritual.
Niklas scowled at Lill’s heels again, refusing to look back.
“Oh! He’s an angry one!” one noted nervously.
“Oh, he’s harmless,” Lill assured her.
“Can we go?” Niklas begged Lill in a whisper.
She seemed to sense the urgency in his tone and, to his relief, bid her friends farewell.
They pushed past the rusty gate and out onto the dirt road. Niklas walked on a limp, his leg still stiff as a Relrin shirt. The vast differences between Relrin and Sharderin society struck Niklas as they traveled.
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Relrins always built on the ground, and their structures were usually cement or wood and not with the most impressive workmanship. He already knew that they didn’t have lights like the Sharderins. But it struck him as odd that they used fire as light in the form of candles or lanterns. The next thing that he realized was the absence of vehicles. He noted a few people in work clothes leading horse-drawn carts with wheels.
Once, he saw a more refined and slender metal carriage drawn by horses without wheels. Gold lines of light pulsed through lumaulic grooves that artistically accented its body. That vessel remained suspended several feet in the air.
The yellow lights unmistakably reminded him of the power sources back in Pit. “Lill,” Niklas started. “Horses draw that vehicle, but it doesn't touch the ground.”
She looked and smiled. “You’re seeing a Relrin air carriage. It probably belongs to a noble or a high merchant,” Her words laced with pride.
Frankly, Niklas wasn’t impressed. It was slow and horse-drawn. Even a larger Drone shuttle moved faster than the air carriage, and they didn’t need beasts of burden to pull them.
Niklas didn’t voice his opinion. He was learning which things it was better to keep his mouth shut about.
They continued for a few moments, and Niklas finally saw that the greatest difference between Relgar and Pit Forest was how green it was in Relgar. Their borders were mere miles apart, but here it was lush and green when it should have been the end of winter.
They passed a few thick fields, and he spotted an odd spinning light mounted on a stand above the crop.
“What is that?” Niklas asked.
Lill followed his gesture. “Crop Remnant,” She said. “Prime Paramount Alred manipulates the weather and plants with them. There hasn’t been a famine in Relgar in eighteen years.”
Realization dawned on Niklas. So this is what became of the remnants the Relrins stole from the Sharderins at the genocide. He couldn’t help but smile. Farming and horse-drawn carriages? If this was the extent of their focus on remnants, they were ill-prepared for the invasion. They had hardly utilized their stolen property in the least.
“Lill?” Niklas asked.
“Yes, dear?”
“Those Relrin mo...women.” he corrected himself. “They seemed to be your friends; they didn’t treat you like a slave.”
Lill furrowed her brow. “Niklas, slavery is illegal in Relgar and every Kelryne nation. We’re debt bonded.”
“What does that mean?” Niklas asked.
Lill contemplated for a moment. “I’m not very good at explaining. It’s all about numbers and debt. I don’t understand numbers very well.”
“Is debt like valor?” Niklas asked, trying to comprehend these new ideas.
“I don’t know what Valor is,” Lill mirrored. “Many paramounts offer loans and set rents. If you get into debt and the debt grows faster than you can ever pay off, you can choose to become debt-bonded, and your debt stops growing. I think that’s called interest. As a debtbond, you work directly for your debtor until you can pay off your debt. Your debtor must provide for your necessities or a liveable allowance, which slows down the payoff. If you have children, your debt is divided, and a portion is assigned to them.” She frowned apologetically. “I don’t know how to explain it any better.”
Niklas nodded as if he understood but was more confused than before she started explaining. “So debt is bad. It’s nothing like valor?”
Lill shrugged. “My grandfather became debt bonded in Chimgar many years ago. He tried to invest in a silver mine, but the prospectors were con men.”
“You can give it a different name, but you’re talking about slavery,” Niklas growled. “Why would you choose to be a debt bond?”
“I chose it,” Lill asserted firmly, “so that I don’t pass a debt so crushing that my children will never be free.”
“You should fight!” Niklas growled. “Better to kill and die defiant of the mother killers.”
Lill inhaled sharply and looked at the nearest traveler on the road. “You mustn’t talk about the purge, Niklas. It’ll only make them angry. If you must talk about it, please refer to it as the Sarine Pestolance.”
“It’ll make them angry?” Niklas cried, “Why would it make them angry? We’re not the ones who butchered their mothers!”
“I know I’m the last one who should speak to this as I’m still alive today,” Lill prefaced, “but that was a darker and messier time.”
“A small shadow compared to what’s to come,” Niklas reflected on his life in the drone army, their weapons, and training.
“What do you mean, Niklas?” Lill asked hesitantly.
Niklas recalled Edgar’s last assignment when he was sent to silence a faceless drone that said too much. That would be a quick way to put Niklas in contact with Edgar, but it was more likely to be a different reaper just crossing another name off the list of dangerous dissidents.
“It’s nothing,” Niklas lied, not ready to put himself on some reaper’s list.
They trekked on for nearly twenty minutes, and the buildings and population thickened. Seeing so many people naked faced felt odd. It was stranger still that there seemed to be an equal balance of men and women.
The road became cobblestone, and the buildings grew two stories tall. They pushed their way through, and Niklas noticed that each building had one or several signs indicating the business it held in Relric. Bars, inns, tailors, carpenters, and jewelers were a few of the first he saw.
He desperately scanned them, looking for one that might indicate the esthetic operator. Doctor Geoffrey would work there.
They made their way down the street, which became increasingly busy. Based on appearance, the town held a diverse array of people. Sullen people with dirty gray work clothes, laughing cheery-eyed men with colorful garb, and even high-headed men who wore ornate suits of clothing. It was oddly familiar. It reminded Niklas of the third level of Pit Two. Only there wasn’t a uniform for each rank. The citizens naturally divided themselves into classes, easily recognized by appearance.
The most pathetic individuals Niklas saw was a group of three Sharderin men. Skin, bone, and rags, they stared absently into space as they sat on the road.
“Who are they?” Niklas demanded in disgust. Such Sharderins would be a disgrace in Pit Forest.
“They’re street greys,” Lill said, not sending them a second glance. “Many Sharderins broke from the Sarine Pestolance and have been worked to uselessness or simply given up. Poor souls, they sit in the streets and wait to die.”
Niklas shuddered at them. That was what it looked like to have no valor.
“I need to go shop for some tea, dear,” she said before entering a store called Teaman’s Enterprises.
“Hey!” Niklas called, causing her to look back. “I’m going to look around a bit. How long will you be?”
“Be back in a quarter hour?”
Niklas nodded before trotting off.
He found a man wearing dirty work clothes and approached him for directions to Dr. Geoffrey’s. The man gave him a sour look and mumbled that he didn’t know before walking away.
Scowling after him, Niklas realized he might be talking to the wrong kind of person. So he jogged after a younger man wearing more colorful and better-fitted clothing.
“Hey man,” Niklas started. “I’m looking for Dr. Geoffrey.”
The man regarded him as something that climbed out of the gutter and grew a mouth to talk.
Niklas clenched his jaw and tried his best to remember where his place would be if he grew up here. “Please, sir,” he tried again with a forced salute. “My boss sent me to find Dr. Geoffrey.”
“He’s just down the road there,” the man said, pointing and eyeing Niklas’ salute in confusion.
“Thank you, sir!” Niklas said, trying his best to play the part. But his false smile melted back to his glare before he turned away. The man was a true Pink, a Mother killer. Why should Niklas treat him with any level of respect?
Niklas followed the man’s directions and found a sign marking Dr. Geoffrey’s Esthetic Artificer. Peeking through the window, Niklas saw a man in white talking to two men in stiff suits. They laughed at their conversations and then headed for the door. Niklas spun and leaned his back against the structure as the door opened.
“Farewell, my friends. If you ever need anything, just pop right in!” The man in white waved them away.
“Will do, Doctor! And thank you!” The two men walked past Niklas, and the man in white turned into his firm’s entrance. He reached for several articles on hooks and produced a black hat, a dark overcoat, and a walking stick. Then he saw Niklas.
“Young man, can I help you?” The doctor asked as he turned to close the door.
“Actually, I came to see you, Dr. Geoffrey,” Niklas said, testing the name.
The man’s expression softened slightly.
“Tell your employer I work by appointment only; you can go in and schedule for him with my secretary.”
“My employer?” Niklas stuttered dumbly. “No, I need help myself. I’m a free man.”
“Oh!” The artificer started as he eyed Niklas. He scanned the scabs on Niklas’ swollen face. “Deep, class three scars. Burns and cuts. These are quite fresh. Removing them would take at least three, maybe even five, appointments. My secretary can explain my rates, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up.” He spun and started walking away.
Niklas flushed red. “Hey!” he barked after Geoffrey and then jogged in pursuit. “Hey, I’m serious!”
Geoffrey sighed in annoyance. “I have somewhere to be. I don’t have time for this. Plus, I don’t think this will be a good use of your money. The scars won’t look as bad once the swelling goes down.”
“I need your help now!” Niklas said evenly.
Dr Geoffery stopped and furrowed his brow at Niklas. “I simply don’t have time to talk to you. Speak with my secretary, or I’ll call the officers on you.”
Growling at his Relrin arrogance, Niklas grabbed the doctor by the shoulder and jerked him into the narrow alley between buildings.
Geoffrey cried out in surprise, but Niklas slapped a firm hand over his mouth. Geoffrey jerked the head of his walking stick to the glint of steel of a concealed sword, but Niklas saw it too early.
Niklas knocked the cane out of the doctor’s hand and, with a snap, held his reaper's blade to Geoffrey’s exposed throat.
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“Scream,” Niklas hissed, “and the only thing they’ll find is your Mother-killing head!” His blade’s razor edge accidentally touched Geoffrey’s throat, and a thin line of blood appeared. Niklas’ hand trembled. He was supposed to be calm, to be a professional. He had trained his whole life, but the truth was that he had little actual experience.
Still, the fire of valor blazed him on.
Pit, this knife is sharp, Niklas thought.
How good it felt to hold one of his people's mortal enemies under its edge.
The doctor’s eyes widened, and he held up his empty hands.
Niklas looked out into the sunlit road in worry. Had anybody seen him? “Let’s go!” he commanded, and he towed Geoffrey deeper down the lane, trying his best to hide his limp.
Niklas pushed him up against the building again, breathing hard. “Look,” he hissed, “I need your help now.”
“You have an interesting way of asking,” the doctor growled.
“I only need to get rid of this one,” Niklas said desperately, pointing to the faceless scar under his eye.
The doctor snorted. “Easy.”
“What will it take?”
“You think I’ll ever help you after this?”
“Look!” Niklas said, the desperation evident in his voice. “I’m not from around here. I’m not used to your culture and bureaucracy, and you seem reasonable. What’s it going to take to get me in now?”
Dr. Geoffrey’s eyes were hardened, but then there it was. The twinkle of greed. “If you had just asked my secretary, you would know that small scar removal costs 500 cesh.”
“Easy,” Niklas said, not knowing what that even meant.
“I don’t think so,” he corrected. “This is deep and will take several sessions, at least another 500.”
Niklas’ grip tightened. “Deal.”
“I’m not done!” He snapped. “Another five hundred because of...this!”
“Okay! I’m sorry.”
“And a final five hundred to skip the queue. We’re booked out for months. I’ll have to operate after hours and off of the books. These are my terms, Two thousand cesh, and I’ll remove that mark. You wouldn’t happen to have two thousand cesh, would you?”
“No,” Niklas said. “But I’ll get it.”
“Oh really? When?”
“In a week,” Niklas said hastily, still not knowing what a cesh was.
“Really?” the doctor laughed.
“Two weeks!” Niklas corrected himself based on the doubt in Geoffrey’s voice.
“Okay, thug. I’ll see you in two weeks, and if I see you again before then without the payment in full, I’ll have you sent to prison. It will be easy, don’t test me.”
“I’m not one of the street greys,” Niklas assured him. “You’d be surprised by what I can do.”
The doctor nodded. “Agreed.” He glanced down at the knife.
“I’m walking out now. Wait three minutes in here, and then you can too.”
“Are you giving me orders?” Geoffrey asked. A gentle nudge from the knife shut him up.
“Three minutes,” Niklas said, then stole back into the bright streets. Sure enough, to his great relief, Dr. Geoffrey waited.
Niklas retraced his steps to the teashop, where he found Lill waiting on a wide set of steps that led into the shop. “Lill,” he greeted her with his heart still racing.
A trio of men approached the stairs ahead of Niklas, all three dressed in fitted white shirts with jewel-toned vests and hats. A young man led the trio, absently speaking over his shoulder. Lill sidestepped, but as the distracted young man turned, he stumbled into her.
The man recoiled in surprise and caught Lill by the arm. “Are you all right, mam?”
Niklas stared in disbelief. A Relrin pushed past Lill, a sharderin mother like she were some faceless Drone.
“Hey!” Niklas barked.
The man turned in surprise.
“How dare you!” Niklas said. “Beg for forgiveness.”