Zel looked around and guessed, “It’s either the owner or the kid in noble’s clothes up on stage.”
“Bingo, it’s the guitarist,” the singer grinned. “He’s older than me n’ drinks like a carp, but homunculus organs take damn good care of you. It’s not just the artificial organs that keep him pretty, though - it’s a lil’ thing called Fivefold Philter. The guy blew what was left of his fortune on getting a huge vat of the stuff made and, well… That baby-face speaks for itself, don’t it.”
“Where’re you going with this?” she prodded, knowing full well he was leading into something. It wasn’t as if he tried to hide it. Like the storyteller he was, he used any opportunity to stir anticipation. To her great relief, he didn’t return to rambling about Ankhezia. Instead, he finally got to the matter at hand - contacting the governor and negotiating payment for services rendered, among other things of bureaucratic nature. Even thinking about paperwork made her blood pressure rise.
Strolvath let a knowing smirk shine through his beard, “Alright. Short of it is, there’s a lot of shit goin’ down. Lots of pieces falling into place and strings being pulled. The governor hasn’t slept more than a couple hours in weeks, and he’s had multiple attempts on his life just this week. That’s why he’s being so cautious, plus he spends pretty much every spare moment working.”
“Working on what?” she questioned. The only answer she got was a look of “You know I can’t tell you.” before Strol returned to the matter at hand. All levity evaporated from his voice in the span of seconds.
“Point being, you won’t be able to meet with him for a couple days until the situation is less volatile,” he sighed. “Right now, just your presence in his office alone could spark unrest on a scale rivaling what we prevented by exterminating the hive. If you want to relay any messages, just write it down.”
Zel chuckled to herself, reaching under the table and pulling her letter to the governor out of her cleaver’s sheath. “I didn’t know things were this bad, but I did intend to send this to the big man rather than breathe the same air as a bunch of bureaucrats…” she remarked, handing the letter over.
With a mildly amused countenance Strol took it from her and looked it over, noting aloud as he examined it: “Warded scholar’s seal, cold-iron amalgam sealing wax, seal-grade paper. The original proprietor of Riverside Remedies left his writing supplies behind, I take it.”
A nod. He put it down on the table, downed what was left of his drink, and asked a question that felt like he intended it to be the last one of this conversation, “Does the letter contain everything you want to tell or ask the governor?”
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Another nod. Strolvath stowed the letter away and stood up, rolling his shoulders and stretching.
“Right, I’ll make sure he reads it by tomorrow,” he said. “You uh, want me to help you find your way back?”
Zelsys knew she could find her way back, but the value of remaining down here any longer was far outweighed by the convenience of not having to explore and potentially get lost in the tunnel-like veins of the city. So she looked down into her tankard, raised it up, kicked it back and downed its remaining contents before she grabbed her cleaver-sheath and stood up.
“Yeah,” she nodded.
Strol grinned and nodded back before he walked towards the door, “Not eager to get lost in this tangled mess, eh? Took me a couple months to find my way ‘round. Easier to navigate in the wilderness I tell you...”
And so it was that the two left the speakeasy, Strolvath greeting the three old men who guarded the stairs on their way out. The last thing Zel remembered of that place was the first couple tones and the beginning line of yet another song:
“Where reality turns to dust and space and time subside, where two universes touch there's a citadel in the sky…”
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“Where reality turns to dust and space and time subside, where two universes touch there's a citadel in the sky…”
So sang young Ezaryl Krishorn, inheritor of her line, as she strummed at the strings of her double-necked instrument and reveled in its growling tones, distorted and amplified by the glyphs carved on the inside of its hollow body. It was an ancient song passed down through history, traced back to the First Fog-sailor, whose strange composition had influenced the development of entirely new instruments for aught but to facilitate proper translation of the original sound. She sat on the roof of her family’s estate, its walls polished limestone. Thousands of kilometers from any other nest of civilization stood the beating heart of the Great Steppe, its towering spires tipped with golden ornaments shining in the sun.
From the great Floating City of Karga, endless waterfalls of lifegiving water ever fed the lands below, the water but exhaust from the arcane mechanisms that kept it afloat. The White Undercity had taken root in the fertile earth below, a hodge-podge of buildings wrought from the ground itself with earth-melding thaumaturgies and those put there brick by brick.
And not a single ballista or cannon in sight, nor a wall for them to be mounted, for the city needed no such defenses. None of the Great Steppe’s natural predators or catastrophes ever approached this sacred place - yet whenever foreign invaders deigned to strike at the steppe’s beating heart, the very catastrophes that dared not touch Karga inevitably struck the invaders, for they knew not the safe paths through the steppe, nor did they know any of the hard-lessons that had taught Kargarians how to survive the steppe’s beasts and plagues.
Indeed, only in ancient times did the rulers of lands afar strike out in envy, and each time did the Floating City merely slip into the Sea of Fog, out of reach. Uninhabited and largely unexplored though it was, its unaging, arcane structures gleamed through the veil between worlds and served to guide Fog-sailors on their journeys. Karga was an empyrean beacon that no great turmoil, no great storm could ever obscure - an especially valuable thing in these tumultuous, stormy times.