Chapter 77 - Find Common Ground

I woke up choking on something sweet, rotten. It was dark where I was. Quiet too. Gasping, I tried to turn over and spit what I could onto the floor, but my limbs wouldn’t do what I wanted them to. Something constricted around me, squeezing until I couldn’t breathe. The way my arms were crossed and stuck against my body, the dampness, the disorientation at just having woken up, all of it built into a surge of panic, and I began to thrash against my bindings. The world started to tilt. The air smelled of stagnant water. Someone gurgled as their mouth slipped beneath the surface-

Then, I heard a voice from the dark.

“Lucky to be alive there, monk,” came a quiet, half-whispered, baritone. “Don’t ruin a good thing by getting rowdy.”

I knew that voice. Didn’t sound anything like Mom. Didn’t trust it, though.

Oddly, that was almost comforting.

In the course of a few breaths, I came back to the present, and my mind finally started to place things where they were supposed to be. I wasn’t bound but wrapped in a bedroll, and I was as far from that place as one could get. I was on Ralqir, years after the accident. The tightness in my chest slowly dissipated, the phantom belts loosening before fading entirely.

I lifted my head slightly, as much as I could, at least. My body felt so heavy. Still, I was able to pick out the dim embers of a dying fire and a dark shape sat next to it, the firelight gleaming off of one of Bole’s tiny knives as he thumbed the edge.

I swallowed and cleared my throat of the leftover food I’d been… convinced to eat.

“Uh. Morning, Bole,” I croaked.

The shadow that was Bole didn’t answer. The only sound out there tonight seemed to be the snores of the others and the rustle of the wind in the leaves.

The guns weren’t firing for the first time in days.

“Quiet tonight, isn’t it?” I asked curiously.

“Small mercy, the quiet,” Bole grumbled. I saw the hood of his cloak turn slightly to look my way. “Or at least it was.”

I frowned. Message received. “Right,” I replied carefully.

A polite person might have elaborated further, told me how the battle went, told me how long I was out, if everyone was alright. Bole didn’t do that though. He just stared into the fire.

HP [242/242]

MP [111/267]

Status: Underfed [Severe]

So I hadn’t been out long enough to refill my mana all the way. I didn’t know how much I was missing near the end, but I had to assume it was a significant amount. We’d set out in the morning too. Now it was night. My max HP was lower than it was supposed to be, but I was getting a penalty to my Body score based on my Underfed status. I’d need to fix that ASAP.

I turned my attention back to Bole. “Guess you drew the short straw for watch duty,” I ventured.

No reply.

“Though, I would imagine watch duty would have you on the wall, not poking at the fire.”

“I was never much of a guard,” Bole finally said sourly. “Didn’t have much patience for fools or foolish convention.” Again, his shadowy hood turned toward me pointedly.

Someone coughed weakly from directly to my left. “Stop it, Fidus,” the person whispered.

Bole was suddenly up, scrambling on all fours until he was next to the bedroll neighboring mine. “Beedy. You okay, big man? Is there something you need? Water? Food?”

Beedy?

I let my head loll over that way. Beedy laid next to me, pale still, covered in sweat, and shivering with fever. He looked thin, skeletal almost, courtesy of Trix’s magic, but his eyes were wide open if glazed and unfocused.

“Need you to stop,” Beedy whispered through cracked lips.

“Alright, alright. The monk didn’t mean to wake you. Just go back to sleep and get your strength up, eh?” Bole replied.

“No. N-Need you to stop it. Stop being-.” The man’s voice trailed off until it vanished entirely, and he sighed. His gaze drifted upward lazily, and his eyelids drooped until they shuddered to a halt half-way down.

Bole got down and put his head on his friends’ chest. Genuine fear was evident on his face while he held his breath to listen for a long handful of seconds. Then, after an interminable amount of time, Beedy’s chest began to rise and fall again.

“Stop the act,” Beedy continued as if he hadn’t just passed out in the middle of a sentence.

Bole sat up again, clearly relieved but unable keep the fear and worry out of his voice. His words came out in a nervous sort of chuckle.

“Why, I’m an open book, old boy.” He reached over to smooth Beedy’s hair. “Just rest, man. Help is on the way.” If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Bole was close to tears.

He kept talking. “Church healers. Flesh melders maybe. The best. We’ve been rubbing elbows with the Headmaster, you know. He’s gonna have the best. Get you fixed right up. Maybe fix that nose of yours too. Save me from your snoring.”

Beedy didn’t respond, however, already back to struggling to breathe in his sleep.

Bole looked on for a solid minute, watching his friend cling to life, then seemed to notice me again, turning away and pulling the hood of his cloak closer around him. He didn’t leave Beedy’s side, though.

“First time I’ve ever heard his voice,” I said, careful not to be too loud for Beedy’s sake.

“Shut the fuck up, monk,” the rogue said, the hood moving as he shook his head. “If you want to keep your tongue, just shut the fuck up.”

Finally able to slip a shoulder out of my bedroll, I gave him a weak half-shrug. I trusted he could see the gesture, giving how everyone on this damned planet had better night vision than me. “Sorry. Just saying he strikes me as the quietly good type. Solid.”

The other man did not lunge for my throat, despite his warnings. My many brushes with death recently and the tiredness I was feeling left my already lacking social skills with little brain power to work with anyway, so I went on.

“If it’ll make you feel better, you can cut out my tongue, but I think it just grows back now,” I joked.

Bole leaned forward intently as if he was thinking about doing just that. The firelight gleamed off one of his blades, but he made no move to use it. His scowl was surely sharp enough to cut, but he eventually lost his motivation, sighing before getting up to head back to the fire.

“Bah,” he scoffed, waving a dismissive hand my way. “Pretty sure your Vulpa is still awake anyway. Don’t want to tangle with him if I can help it.”

“Tangle with him again, you mean,” I added, remembering the first time we’d met, how Trix attached himself to Bole’s face. Bole’s scars from that little dustup were still pink

The corner of Bole’s mouth inched slightly upward at that. “Right. He was a scrapper before all this. But now he’s a killer. Don’t want my insides aired out, yeah?”

Bole scooped something up off the ground. Then he reached over to plop a bowl on my chest, which I barely caught before it could roll off to the side. From the smell of it, it was more porridge. Clumsily, I disentangled my other hand from my bedroll and lifted the bowl to my lips. I’d long lost my taste for the stuff, given the circumstances I kept getting fed like this.

Ugh. This is way too much like the time in the Undercity. Least it’s not cold.

I said as much between torturous sips.

“I never liked it either,” Bole replied. “Don’t know anyone that really does other than those that grow up on it.”

“It’s like someone stored the oats with their dirty laundry.”

Bole snorted. “Oats? Monk, that’s Undercity meal. There ain’t no oats in that.”

“Oh,” I said, looking down into the bowl. “Do I want to-”

“Know what’s in it? Not if you want to keep your appetite.”

More awkward silence. This time, because I was busy trying to guess as to what they might put in “Undercity meal.” Eventually, I had to give up, though. My imagination was too good.

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“Tell me about him,” I probed with a half full mouth, purposefully not thinking about the taste. “About Beedy, I mean.”

“A good man. That’s all,” Bole said after a long pause. “Deserves better than this, being out here with slagged insides.”

I nodded around my porridge. It was always the innocent people that got the worst when things went to shit. That just might have been the one multiversal truth.

“The world’s not kind to the good,” I said, my mind going back to Vince, Hunty.

Don’t forget Mom.

“Most true thing you’ve said since I’ve met you, monk.”

Another bout of silence. The unsaid hanging around us like unseen watchers. Bole sighed and shifted his body until he was facing me entirely. Gone was the man’s default disdainful sneer, replaced by a far away look that I recognized right away.

“That bite was meant for me.” The words pried their way out of him, hard, quiet..

I swallowed the last of my food and sat up. “Meant for you?”

“I- I wasn’t paying attention. We were out looking for trouble, me and Beedy, but we hadn’t found a thing in days. Was starting to think we were alone out here. Would have been nice after that business in the city, you know? There was a hollow under a tree. Should have checked it, but I didn’t. I wasn’t on,” he said, using both hands to point at his head to emphasize his last sentence.

He sniffed.

“Beedy was thinking, though,” Bole continued. “When that spider came for me, he- Beedy… he was right there.”

He looked over at his friend and shook his head mournfully. “We’re cousins, actually. By blood. My mum’s side. But he’s worth six of me by my count.”

Family, huh? I didn’t see the resemblance, but I’d never been good at that sort of thing.

“It does something to you, doesn’t it?” I found myself asking. “Being saved, I mean. You spend the rest of your life wondering if they’d made the right call.”

Bole gave the slightest of nods. He had one of his knives clutched tightly in his hand again, running his thumb over the blade, a little trickle of blood dribbling down the side.

“I could have slipped it, monk. I’m quick on my feet. Strong. That spider didn’t have a prayer of biting me.”

“Because you’re a practitioner,” I finished for him.

Surprise played briefly across his face. It wasn’t much, just a widening of the eyes and a loosening of his jaw, but it was there. The far away look left him, and he was back with me for the briefest of moments. However, his poker face was back quickly enough that one might even doubt they saw the mask slip at all.

“Pft. Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“I started to suspect when you decked me in the Undercity,” I told him. I slid my bowl to the side so it wouldn’t spill as I wriggled my legs out from my bedroll. I was still wearing the pants I had on earlier today at least. My shirt was MIA, however. Trix’s magic had stripped my body of pretty much all fat and some of the muscle mass, but even as I sat here, my System enhanced healing could almost be observed with the naked eye, rounding out my chest and arms, giving my stomach definition I’d never had in my old life.

“You’re fast and quiet. Weirdly so. Then there was that moment where my aura slipped out of my control after I’d woken up in that old basement. Seemed to rattle you. Combine that with the other stuff like your association with Jassin, and it’s not a big leap in logic. You’re a practitioner, but you don’t want anyone to know,” I said.

Bole made a rude sound and poked at the fire. “I ain’t nothing but me, Monk.”

“He would have been a practitioner,” Samila said from my left as she crawled stiffly up to the fire to warm her hands. She was wearing her smallclothes, just covering what needed to be covered, making the enormous navy blue bruises on her scales all the more apparent. Her movements looked weak and sore, the way one might move the day after an accident or after a marathon.

“That is if his life had turned out differently. Our first relatively quiet night, and the men decide to share their feelings. Typical,” She grumbled, though the words had no real venom behind them.

“I’m on watch,” Bole corrected her before turning back to me with a frown. “I’m not a practitioner. Wouldn’t have been anyway. It’s just something I picked up as a kid.”

“Inherited?” I asked.

Bole didn’t say, but Samila nodded, causing the hooded rogue to scowl at her.

I looked over at Beedy. “What about him then?”

Bole sighed and shook his head. “If only. He’d be a damned good one. Claim is too weak, though.”

“Doesn’t seem to stop him,” Samila said.

“That’s right,” Bole agreed with pride. “Strong. Smart. Solid, like the monk said. All without having to sell himself to anyone. Funny that.”

“You would see it as a transaction wouldn’t you?” Samila argued. It sounded like an old argument, one they’d had before. “The oaths we take are a gesture of humility and faith in something bigger than ourselves. We lose nothing and gain everything by taking them.”

“Empty words,” Bole scoffed. “A bad deal. Empty words exchanged for a lifetime of servitude.”

My neighbor stirred again. “Stop it, Fidus,” Beedy wheezed before going into a coughing fit. “Can’t just be me.”

Bole lowered his tone. “You’re not going anywhere, mate. Stop talking like that.”

Beedy wasn’t satisfied, though. “Can’t just be- *cough* me.”

The hooded man looked up to the sky as if asking an unseen deity for strength, clenching his fists on his lap. “Fine. Everyone else knows this, Monk, but-” Bole sighed. “Monk, I used to be nobility, one of those families given a title for services rendered during the crusades. Used to manage a little hamlet way out on the edge of the empire. Nice place. Good people. Beedy’s from there too.” Bole glanced over at Samila as if looking for some kind of objection, but he received none.

“Unfortunately for us,” he went on. “We were also one of the families that kept their ancestor’s relic blades from back in the day.”

“Unfortunately?” I asked the obvious question. What was wrong with having a relic? Supposedly, I had one of them. It liked to explode.

“The secret to brightsteel was lost a while back when the church went through a schism. The crusaders were a secretive bunch, and their techniques weren’t written so much as passed down from master to apprentice,” Samila explained. “The metal is a miracle of sorts. The maelstrom’s purest light made manifest through means unknown. Scholars have been trying to recreate it ever since, and the supply of it dwindles more every year.”

Bole looked at her oddly. She’d just explained something that was common knowledge for my benefit, I guessed.

“Right. Well-” Bole continued. “The church fancied my father’s blade, given to him by his father and his father’s father, back and back and back to the bloody crusades. Da was a proud man, though. He wasn’t about to give up family history and our claim to our legacy,” Bole lamented.

He took that moment to unsheath one of his knives again and twirl it over his knuckles. “He did, however, pledge his second son to serve the church and strengthen his ties to the faith.”

Bole had been in the church at one time. I’d gathered as much from context clues so far, but I had no idea he’d been practically forced into it. His animosity, while seeming irrational at times, made a bit more sense now. That couldn’t have been the whole story, though. Nobody as angry as Bole got that way for a singular reason.

He let out a long, tired breath, staring into the fire as the knife tumbled around on his fingers. “I tried to make a real go of it. I really did.”

“In your own way,” Samila giggled. “Brothel visits and tavern crawls among the faithful went up by half, at least.”

“No stricture against fun that I can recall, though my recollection from those times is fuzzy,” Bole chuckled darkly. “Anyway, that’s how I met this lot. Then, the church dissolved my family’s title. They took our land and our home. Just like that. Legally too.”

“That’s not everything,” Samila interjected. “As I recall, they petitioned Lord Bole for access to the sword, but he denied them again and again. I recall your father also declaring all members of the clergy unwelcome on his land. A harsh thing, especially for the faithful that lived under him.”

Bole shrugged. “I did say he was proud. Anyway, they took everything my father owned and folded it into our liege lord’s holdings. Da died a year later. After that, I just couldn’t keep the faith anymore. I quit.”

“You did more than quit,” Samila chided. “You stole some sensitive books and scrolls and set a paired flare paper under the head cleric’s mattress. Probably sold the scrolls to one of the Prefect’s stand-ins, too, or you wouldn’t have been allowed to join the guard. The church couldn’t prove that, though.”

“And they never will. That’s when Siss and I parted ways. To a dragon, oaths are forever. Remember that, monk.”

“We just have a highly developed sense of honor and integrity,” Samila preened with a raised chin. “More people could do with a little of that.”

“The church broke faith long before I did, and, in my reckoning, made me a free agent. Siss disagreed.”

Bole cleared his throat and spared a glance for Beedy who seemed to be content enough with the story to sleep through it.

“You were doing things, Bole,” Samila argued. “Bad things. Things she couldn’t be a part of.”

“I was playing the hand I was dealt,” Bole growled. “Living by my own rules.”

He snatched his knife out of the air and got his feet under him like he was going to stand, but then he stopped, slumped back down as he ran his free hand down his face.

Samila seemed like she wanted to reach out and place a hand on Bole’s arm, but she only got halfway there before she seemed to decide against it.

“You turned spiteful and angry, Fidus.” Samila said, her tone gentler now, less accusatory.

“I was in the middle of destroying my life. Siss didn’t need to be there for that,” Bole declared with sad finality.

“Then Beedy showed up,” I guessed, turning the subject to something Bole was more comfortable with.

“Then Beedy showed up,” Bole affirmed with a grateful smile. “Had news of my mum, my brother. Sobered me up just so he could give it to me. Then he just kind of… stayed. That’s it. He just stayed.”

He grinned, seeming to remember something he was keeping to himself.

I thought of Vince, how he stuck with me after my accident, after Mom died. How wretched I felt. The guilt and rage at having been the cause of her death. I’d done my best to push everyone away too. I stopped speaking. Going out. Stopped cutting my hair. I wasn’t eating. I actively despised others I considered friends beforehand.

As much as I didn’t like to think about it, I didn’t become a pariah overnight. The Constance clan had their hangups about the weak, but I did my part too, didn’t I?

Vince stuck around, though, always with me despite how much I changed since that day. I became a completely different person than the one he knew, but he didn’t care.

“Maybe he’s waiting for you to come back to yourself,” Samila offered.

“Maybe,” Bole replied, getting up and stretching before loping over to the stairs that led to the top of the wall. He started climbing. “Maybe I’m already myself. Have been for a while.”

Maybe, sometimes, our friends see something in us we can’t see in ourselves.

“Wait. Is sharing time over? You guys aren’t going to hug or anything?” Samila teased, stretching as she made to rise.

“Hell, no!” Bole barked from the top of the wall.

“He fed me to dead people,” I said with a shake of my head.

Bole chuckled out there in the dark. “Hehe. Yeah. That was pretty good.”

Rolling her eyes, Samila made to get up but stopped suddenly, as if something had just occurred to her. She turned to me then and ran her gaze up and down my body, lingering a long time on my exposed chest and shoulders. I bravely stood my ground, since I was too weak to actually run away.

“Sweet dreams,” she crooned, before slinking back to her bedroll for the rest of the night.

“Yeah. Uh. You too,” I replied, keeping careful track of her movements until she left the circle of firelight.

Then I was left alone with my thoughts. That wouldn’t do.

There’ll be time for introspection after I save the world. Or when I’m dead. Preferably in that order.

I looked over to the shadowy area that housed my workbench. On it would be scraps of failed chain charges, the ones that almost got us all killed having to deploy them outside the walls. It was time to go back to the drawing board on that one… or was it?

Oh, that just might work.