11 - EXPLORING

While Justinia went off on her own—presumably to set up the meeting I’d asked for—I decided to wander the streets of Tymora. This, I told myself, was a useful and important thing for me to do, since the more I knew about the city, its people, and its current circumstances, the more prepared I’d be for whatever came next.

In truth, I just wanted to explore.

Before she’d left, Justinia had left me spare clothes to change into, which I appreciated, because I didn’t much fancy the idea of going out into the city in the flowing, black robes of a necromancer—especially considering that it was a hot, cloudless day, and I have never much liked the heat.

The clothes were simple and pre-worn. A white linen shirt accompanied a pair of trousers. No shoes, but my old boots worked well enough.

Justinia had also been kind enough to leave me money.

A small leather pouch was filled with crisp banknotes. I counted them out and sorted them. Ten of them were marked with a ten, five with twenty, one with fifty. Each note boasted the face of the Autarch, as regal and ageless as always, on one side, and a separate face on the other. For the tens, this face was a woman, beautiful, sharp-faced, wearing a black, jagged crown. I understood her to be Amara, the Autarch’s wife, and one of the most powerful individuals in the empire.

On the back of the twenties was another face—another woman. Beautiful, but in a different way. Less regal, less majestic. And in her features was a resemblance to the Autarch so distinct that I knew, instinctively, that she was his sister—and that made her Devina, Kyrios—or master—of the Order of the Seeking Hand.

The other face on the fifty was a man, beady-eyed, with a strong jaw, a pinched mouth, and the overall appearance of a person I immediately assumed to be untrustworthy and ruthless.

I would later be proven correct in these assumptions.

There was a note from Justinia. It said this:

Aurion—I’ve left you two hundred and fifty syn. That’s money, in case you hadn’t yet figured that out. It’s a lot of money, but not too much so as to draw suspicion. Nonetheless, spend it wisely, and with discretion, and preferably not at all. I’ll be back later tonight. Don’t get in trouble. Don’t fight anyone, or bring anyone back from the dead, or otherwise draw attention to yourself. In fact, I’d prefer if you stayed in your room.

Justinia.

There was zero chance I’d been staying in that room and we both knew it.

And so out into the streets I went.

Without Justinia to guide me through the wide and cramped streets of Tymora, the experience of navigating the city proved to be incredibly overwhelming. I was immediately thrust into a stream of people flowing toward Tymora’s heart. A squad of four Terarch Guard in their resplendent uniforms were violently shoving their way through one section of the crowd. As I watched, one slammed an armored elbow into an old man’s face, shattering his nose, adding the metallic reek of blood to air already laden with a multitude of unpleasant scents.

I went the opposite way.

It was soon apparent, however, that there was no escaping the Terarch Guard.

They were present wherever I went, standing on street corners or roaming in squads, almost always of four, but sometimes of six or even eight. Several times I saw them lounging outside of establishments. Often they had small, strange objects in their mouth, which they appeared to be sucking on; afterward, they exhaled smoke. These, Justinia would explain to me later that night, were called cigarillos, and were made and exported in vast quantities from the northern lands of Sihalia, where they were seen as highly fashionable.

I stepped into a dark and quiet alley, desperate for a brief respite from the noisy streets.

In that alley, two members of the Terarch Guard were beating a man to death.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The man was maybe sixty, although his age was hard to truly determine through the mask of blood his face had become. He was on the ground, rolling around, attempting to cover his head and stomach from the vicious boots kicking at him. One of the Guard stomped on the man’s right hand. Even standing at the other end of the alley, I heard bone shatter.

I stared. All thoughts dissipated from my mind.

Rage began to build up inside of me—and accompanying it was fear.

“Please,” the man managed to gasp out, and a moment later was kicked in the side of the head.

He went unconscious.

And was back a moment later, convulsing, twitching.

The two Terarch Guards weren’t even saying anything. Maybe they were simply past the point of words. They grunted in exertion, their faces strained, sweat-sheened, as though this was the hardest physical activity they’d ever performed. It almost looked like they were engaged in manual labor—there was no longer any emotion to the beating. It was a chore.

One of the Guards lifted his boot and placed it above the old man’s head, ready to stomp his skull into the cobbles.

“Stop!” I cried out.

The Guard paused.

Both of their heads turned. They regarded me with dark eyes that appeared black in the dimly lit alley.

“Walk away,” one said, though really, he panted out the words.

I pointed to the old man. “What did he do to deserve this?” As though any answer could really justify this outright brutality—but I didn’t know what to say, or what to do.

Don’t draw any attention, Justinia had written.

And here I was, questioning two members of the Terarch Guard.

It felt suddenly as though fate itself were trying to trap me in its web, to cut me off from my destiny before it could even begin to be realized.

The smart thing to do was turn around and walk away—just as the man had just instructed.

And yet—I couldn’t.

The whole purpose of what I intended to do was to save the world from the Autarch and his oppression. And what I was seeing now was a symptom of that very thing, a small, contained manifestation of what Marak had done to the continent.

I couldn’t walk away from it. Couldn’t let this man die at the hands of brutes.

I stepped forward.

The Guard who’d been about to stomp the man’s head offered me a sour, yellow grin. He strolled a couple of feet toward me. I became painfully aware of the heavy, double-edged sword sheathed at his hip.

“Last chance,” he said. “How old are you, son? No need to throw it all away over a little misunderstanding. Get out of here, forget you saw anything, and—”

And although I had never been in a fight before, or any real confrontation, it nonetheless seemed obvious to me that the first and principle rule of any violent encounter ought to be to strike first, and to strike when the opponent was least expecting it.

And so that’s what I did.

Perhaps I have mentioned already that there are five disciplines of necromancy. The disciplines of bones and souls were the two I was most versed in—bones on account of my parent’s own preferences and tutelage, and souls as a result of who I was, and how I’d been born.

The discipline of shadow was not one I had studied much. We of the Withered Isles neglected it.

Yet, on my own, I had discovered tomes in our Dread Library, had studied shadows in secret.

And I knew enough to do this next thing.

Shadows twisted around the feet of the Guard, wrapping around his ankles and yanking him down abruptly. Words cut off, he fell with a shriek, head slamming into the rough cobbled stone. Not unconscious, but dazed.

My eyes met those of the other Guard.

He pulled his own sword free. His eyes darted past me, toward the alley entrance. He opened his mouth.

I knew that he would call for help.

That, I could not allow.

A garrote of liquid shadow coiled around his neck, so thin as to be nearly imperceptible—and incomprehensibly sharp.

It cut through his neck so easily that I found myself staring with open-mouthed shock as his head separated from his body and hit the ground a moment later. The impact jolted me back into awareness. As did the arterial spray from the neck, which decorated the crumbling and stained alley walls with glistening crimson.

The old man was now starting to pick himself off of the ground. I was glad to see that he had the strength to at least do that.

I was less glad when the other Guard, the one on the ground, started to scream for help.

“Oh,” I said, and staggered back. The decapitated Guard’s body fell backward and hit the ground with a crash of metal against stone that was as good as any alarm.

If I survived this mess, Justinia was going to kill me.