Chapter 5 - Merissa

‘From sunless night, cleansing light.’

- Oath of the Pallbearers of Oreikhalia

No matter how many cities she traveled to, Merissa thought as they passed the third beggar in the park, the slums all blended together. She had dined at fine tables with lords and ladies while on assignment - each house a different shade of opulent - and she had begged for her breakfast in Orolain’s Low City with the starving and the desperate.

In her experience, there were a thousand ways to be rich, but being poor was always the same.

“Spare some scepters?” came a voice from the nearby brush. A girl - she could be no older than fourteen - stepped out from where she’d been sleeping. Her hair was an endless forest of split ends, and Merissa could see the outline of her ribs through her stained shift.

A refugee from a border town in Old Immeria, perhaps? She had the look. The imperials that survived Adrias’ Folly all carried the same ghosts around their necks.

Watching the remnant of your country swallow itself whole overnight tended to do that.

“Of course,” she replied with a warm smile, pulling out a purse she’d swiped on her way out of the bar. She jingled it once, making sure the urchin knew she was on the up and up. “I’ll take some directions in trade.”

“Sure, where’d you want to go?” whispered the girl, gaze fastened to the promise of a meal.

“We want to see the Monument of the Fallen Cavalier. I’ve heard it’s beautiful under Kannia’s light.” The Azure Moon was known to be the gentlest of the trio.

She slipped the purse into the urchin’s hands before Skeir could object. She could feel the Helkorite’s glare behind her, a dagger in the small of her back.

The girl’s cracked lips faltered, curled to match her smile from before. “Head north a block from here, then take your next three lefts.” She hesitated. “Blessings of the Ten Virtues upon you.”

Before Merissa could call back, the urchin bounded away and disappeared into the foliage.

Her jaw twitched. She reminded herself that it wasn’t heresy to accept a simple thanks, even if those well-wishes were offered by way of the Graceless Spirits.

“That was stupid,” said Skeir. He had come up along her left-hand side, taking two strides for each of her three.

She had taken the opportunity to make a proper study of the man since they’d struck their bargain. In that time, Merissa had deduced a few things.

Skeir wore his cloak over broad shoulders like armor, keeping his eyes fixed on their surroundings as they walked. The only time he’d taken off the garment was to bandage his shoulder. He had thickset features, pale with heavy brows and a wide nose - he probably hadn’t been the most handsome sort, even before the scars.

Up close, she noticed more of them: the largest ran from the bottom of his chin to his left eye, but there were older marks at his temples, behind his ears, at his neck. His hands bore the same kind of faded cuts, and about as many calluses.

She’d been right, back at the Mess: this was a man intimately familiar with both sides of violence. It was not a common soldier who got up close with Iscerian bravos and hardened Novi brawlers and walked out the sole survivor. She even suspected he had been the one to set the blaze, probably to cover his tracks. Based on what he’d been talking to Wren about, he was in town on a mission just like hers.

Well, maybe not just like hers. She suspected Skeir wasn’t planning a tearful reunion with any of the people he seemed to be hunting.

He also didn’t speak much, and never without immediate purpose. Which meant she’d had to take the initiative.

“You think so?” she asked, a clear invitation to elaborate.

“We could have found the statue on our own. If the Thronekeepers come through, all it takes is one bribe for them to catch our trail.”

She shook her head. “They won’t be looking for us in the first place. Neither you nor I instigated that fight back there, and nobody saw us escape.”

“How can you be sure?”

Merissa hesitated. She wasn’t about to mention how she’d used shadow magic to stay out of sight on her way out of the Mess. Telling Skeir about the Pall would be as good as blowing her cover, and that was out of the question.

“They’ll talk to the locals who got out,” she answered the first half of the question, “and learn that it was a bunch of jumped up Iscerian shits who got drunk and wanted to start something. After that, I promise we’ll be their last priority.”

He made a mollified noise by way of reply, not slowing as he turned in a direction she hoped was north. She followed him at a skip, speaking softly in case there were more people lurking nearby.

“Walk me through the plan. You said these guys are underground? As in, literally?”

“Mhm. There’s a tunnel entrance hidden beneath the monument, which leads to pre-war catacombs in the rock. Apparently this crew moves around, they’re hiding out down there now. We approach them, and ask them some questions. Me first, then you.”

“And you think they’ll give either of us what we want to know? If they’re at all serious, they aren’t going to just open up to a pair of complete strangers.”

That earned her another glower. “I can be diplomatic when I need to be.”

“What I’m hearing is that you had a plan that went the same way as that bar. Let me guess, you were going to use a middleman?” She didn’t mention Wren’s name, but the dangerous glint in his eye told her she was right on the mark yet again. She pressed on.

“These underworld types, it’s all about who you know. Without someone to vouch for us, we’ll be presumed hostile before we ever have a chance to sit down at the table.”

The veteran cleared his throat defensively. “I have the leader’s name: Veclere. That’s something.”

“Great,” Merissa returned fire, holding back an eye-roll. “Anything else?”

“He’s a Latent.”

Shit. So she hadn't misheard Wren earlier. “So not only are we going in without someone to pave the way for us, the leader of the gang we’re about to try to coerce for answers - without any kind of payment in exchange - is a trained mage who can probably boil us alive with one look?”

“Even practitioners can be caught by surprise,” he gravelled. “And you were the one who said you’d be negotiating.”

Well then. He seemed quite confident he wouldn’t get them killed in a fight, and at the very least he could take a beating. The bound cut on his shoulder and the recently healed one in his side would be slowing anyone else down. It still wasn’t much of a plan.

But an hour ago she had nothing, so she’d take what she could get. Her bosses had given her five days to get answers, and that meant she had to find Naora. If she could get to this 'Veclere', get him to talk, she might be able to at least find her wife.

And then there was the second part of her assignment. One thing at a time.

So Merissa decided not to engage further, choosing to focus instead on the sights of the twisting torchlit laneways surrounding them.

Unlike the rest of the city, the avenues of Portside were far from well ordered, because it had not been built to be anything other than the port for Haedren’s fortress. Growing up around the Seat on an island, Equinox began as a small town that made the castle more livable, offering food and drink, entertainment, and other supplies to the soldiers and nobles stationed there.

While the outer walls and even the dividing borders that kept the Zones apart went up decades ago - a later agreement, she’d learned in her research, to keep Equinox from ripping itself apart during the Four-Throne War - no such grand design had existed for the port. As such, its development had been haphazard at best, driven by immediate need rather than any kind of foresight or planning.

The harbour itself was the district’s central hub. The Bay of Blessure’s location at the mouths of the Sevren and Alberus rivers and its direct access to the Livid Sea had long since cemented Haedralia as a strategic location for naval trade. That meant hundreds of ships coming and going each tenday, which necessitated scores of wharves and berths capable of housing them.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

Expanding the warehouses, taverns, yards, and brothels were the next priority: all of them were immediate critical infrastructure to keep Portside’s never-ending flood of sailors and merchants well-stocked and satisfied between voyages. Each year, the number of shoreside businesses grew, blocks of cheap housing going up as families of the permanent workers moved in and the local population multiplied.

Before long, there was no space outside the four Zones that was not crammed to bursting.

And of course, the war itself had been immensely profitable for Equinox. Even after the Immerians moved their court deep into their lands, no general would dare sack the site of Haedren’s Seat. Instead, as protected neutral ground, it had become a paradise for arms shipments, the sale of information, and the hiring of unsavory contractors of all types.

It was hard for someone in her profession to pass judgment. The Oreikhalia had certainly made plenty of successful deals in the city’s shadows over the years. She’d read the records, buried in the deepest layers of the Sunless Vaults.

All of them for the good of the Blessed Beyond, she reminded herself.

The signing of the Equineal Accords had officially put an end to the black market… which had only succeeded at driving it out of sight. That was why traffickers like Undertow could exist in the first place: they were still permitted to operate under the bastard fig leaf of plausible deniability, so long as they paid off the right people and didn’t make too much noise.

Add together a thriving criminal element, rampant overpopulation, and a bloated bureaucracy, and the chaos of Portside became inevitable. There was no reason to the streets: one avenue would end abruptly as it ran into a half-collapsed building, or it would suddenly spawn two more running in parallel. There were oases of organization - the odd square or colonnade, the squandered dream of some hopeful administrator long ago - but they were few and far between.

It was a miracle that Skeir was able to lead them through at all, though the longer Merissa spent in the man’s company, the more she was convinced that he was making it all up as he went along.

It felt uncomfortably close to what she was doing.

And of course, they weren’t alone. Everywhere Merissa looked in the half-dark, she saw open mouths and hungry eyes: huddled by corners, peering out of doorways, or tucked away in the folds of tents on the side of the road. She ignored any further requests for charity, sticking close to the big scary soldier and pushing down the twinges of guilt in her chest.

This was not her city, she told herself, and these were not her kin. Right now, she could only afford to care about saving one person.

“We’re here.” The girl had been telling the truth: they’d arrived at a small square, abutted on three sides by steep walls. A garden of weeds lay strewn before them, and from the heart of the tangle loomed their destination. She stepped up beside the Helkorite to get a better look.

The Monument of the Fallen Cavalier was a cautionary tale about good intentions. It had been commissioned by the four continental powers in the early days after the Accords to honour all those whose bodies were never recovered in the war - including the countless thousands lost in the disaster that was Adrias’ Folly.

Predictably, within a few weeks the committee had come to blows.

The version she’d heard was that the Valmontese had backed out of the project first, citing creative differences and pulling their funding and recalling their workers. Of course, she knew nothing was that simple, and there was likely blame on all sides.

In the end, what remained was something done halfway, and poorly. The initial shape was clear enough to her eye - a man at least ten paces tall cast in bronze. He was helmed and armored, and sat astride a monstrous stallion of the same rearing its front hooves in triumph. In one hand he bore a shield, and in the other he held aloft a lance in preparation for some great charge.

Beyond that, the details began to fall apart. The war for the cavalier’s identity had begun early enough that everything about him, from the style of plate to his badges of rank and the crest on his shield, was a contradiction. She spotted Iscerian tassels hanging at his gauntlet, a heavy breastplate that could only have come from a Helkoran forge, and a distinctly Medean coronal adorning his helm. And of course, the lance itself was the very symbol of Valmontese chivalry.

The tragedy, she mused, was that if these touches had been coordinated, this could have been beautiful. Instead, there were more scars on the monument than she’d seen on her new friend. The gouges and nicks left in the bronze were all visible, open efforts to chip away the contributions of the other artists.

Meanwhile, the patina of age was already starting to creep in. Within a decade, the verdigris would fill in the cracks completely, burying all traces of petty discord. Time would transfigure the knight into untruth; a fidelity neither intended nor earned.

“We should get digging.” Skeir was already moving, getting to his hands and knees and scrabbling at the dirt and overgrown vines at the plinth. Merissa recognized the outline of a plaque, though there were no words engraved in it. The artisans must not have gotten that far.

“Hold on.” She furrowed her brows. The tunnel would be below ground level, but why would its builders risk a secret entrance that any passer-by could stumble upon? Digging for it was both time-consuming and a waste of their energy.

A single running jump got her to the top of the stone base, right up against the horse’s flank. She hoisted herself up the side of the statue, using first the stirrups and then the creases in the knight’s greaves.

“What are you doing?” hissed the Helkorite. “Someone’s going to see you.”

“Then be on the lookout. This shouldn’t take long.” If she were digging a secret tunnel to connect pre-war catacombs to a newly-built public memorial, she would make sure nobody could open the door by accident. And if someone were looking for said door, what better place to hide it than in plain sight to confound them?

There was only one place that fit both criteria.

Sure enough, inside of a minute Merissa had found something: one of the folded plates above the waist of the statue was a slightly darker shade of green. Tugging at it, she realized that it came off completely, revealing a dial buried in the untarnished bronze.

It was a small circle of stone, no bigger than her palm, with a number of notches carved along its outside. She recognized the script. This was Naxa, the unofficial language of the Golden Reaches - or the Nascyrian Confederacy, as many in those lands preferred to call it.

Not that their preferences had ever mattered to an Iscerian crown.

Unfortunately, she didn’t read Naxa. Still, she could hazard a guess as to what the sigils meant. The first was a basic looking symbol which gradually grew in complexity as it ran clockwise in sequence around the circumference of the dial.

It’s a timed switch. This would hold the passage open for a predetermined amount of time. Her eyebrows rose. This was a level of sophistication she had not expected from what she’d heard Wren describe as a gang of small fish. How had they even embedded this system into the statue?

“Get ready to look for an entrance,” she called down to Skeir as loud as she dared. Then she reached into the compartment and twisted the dial about a third of the way.

Her command turned out to be unnecessary, as they both heard a low rumbling a moment later. A single flagstone near the base of the plinth had begun to move, sliding into a disguised cavity and revealing a narrow, slanting passage that descended into the earth.

“That wasn’t too hard to crack,” Merissa announced as she put the false plate back and hopped down from the statue. “But that’s not the kind of door just anyone can build.”

“No, it isn’t. Means we’re on the right track. Come on.”

Merissa didn’t object to Skeir taking the lead, his shoulders hunched as he stepped into the tunnel. She followed two paces behind. A second grinding noise heralded the flagstone’s return to its initial position, cutting off the last vestiges of the Kannia’s light.

Her eyes adjusted preternaturally to the gloom, as they had countless times before. One more gift from the Pall. Instead of formless shadow, she saw the contours of the corridor ahead in a wash of muted charcoal and navy. She could see Skeir perfectly as well, though he were standing out in a field at midday. She grinned.

The last night she’d been afraid of the dark, she was eleven years old.

“Look for lamps,” came the Helkorite’s voice. “They must keep one nearby.”

They did, in fact. It hung from a hook on the wall ahead and to the right, not that she was about to announce it to the man. Instead, she agreed and put on a show of tapping the walls for about thirty seconds before ‘finding’ it.

The miniature glass casing at the center of the apparatus was full of a dull red salt; a kymical lamp. Pulling out a match from her pocket, she lit it. As she did, she noticed that this one had a hood, a small crank allowing her to narrow a steel cone at the aperture’s point and narrow the field of light to a focused beam.

It was the favored tool of thieves who wanted to illuminate their targets without giving their faces away. Not that she or Naora had ever needed one.

As the two of them stood in the vermillion-bathed hallway, Skeir held out a hand to trace the closest wall, eyes sweeping around them.

“Something’s not right here.”

It took her a second to realize what he was talking about - then she saw it too.

“It’s smooth.”

The walls, the floor and ceiling; none of them had any cracks or joins, no evidence of mortar or dust, or really any evidence of tool-work at all. The stone was flawless from top to bottom. Looking ahead, Merissa also noticed that the tunnel never dipped or rose beyond its steady downward angle. It proceeded as though seeking to travel forever, stopping only when it hit a wall and veered off somewhere far away.

This had not been carved by hand. This could only be the result of a Working, a magical ritual performed by a Latent: a practitioner of the magical Arts.

She didn't make a habit of socializing with mages, though of course she'd built a theoretical base of study. From what she’d read, each Latent tapped into and bent the rules of the seven known Primalities - creational laws inherent to the foundation of the world itself. They all specialized in different areas, had different names.

If anyone asked her about the Pall, for instance, she'd been schooled to say that she knew a few lumeid Secrets: methods of bending the Primality of Light.

Suddenly, the mystery of how Undertow had built their secret door made a lot more sense. They hadn’t just been smart… they had access to someone who specialized in those kinds of projects. The kind of person who could, say, create an entire tunnel with a few Workings.

If they so chose, that person could also create false hallways, build impossible traps, and even collapse entire caverns. And she and Skeir were about to walk into his lair, with no reinforcements on the way.

Would Aleixus and the other Untarnished have sent more agents, if she’d asked? No, she decided. They’d already committed two of their best, and would not risk being found out on behalf of her or her wife. She had to be the one to see this through.

Glory to the Mantle.

“This Veclere may be more than we bargained for.”

Skeir grunted. “I’ve met worse. I’ll bet you have too.”

She didn’t feel the need to reply to that one. This brute knew enough about her already. It wasn’t like they were going to turn back now, in any case.

On they went, until the tunnel swallowed them whole.