Chapter 2 – Two Midnight Encounters
Two Days Before…
“Fire a warning shot. They are well within our range now.”
“They might not even see the shot!”
“See it, maybe not. But they should be expecting one.”
Atop the outer walls of Belle’s Hold, an archer and a gatekeeper attempted to find their bravery.
The archer fingered the feather tips of his arrow, and he drew a long and slow breath as he knocked the arrow.
As if whispering for fear that these strangers might hear from nearly two hundred yards away, the words seemed afraid to exit the gatekeeper’s lips, “Fire it close to them.”
The two figures had been spotted some hour ago as the sun was setting, but as the night had worn on the two had disappeared into the distant dusk that darkened everything around them. Carrying no torch, creating no noise, the figures had vanished completely. Until only a few moments ago! Laughter was heard in the dark, and as the archer strained his sight, he spotted the silhouettes among the shadows.
“Archer!” The gatekeeper’s fingers were clawed around the chiseled stone of the wall, grasping for any chipped stone that might let him hold onto sanity. His words shivered out, “Fire it!”
It was a crack of thunder as the arrow pierced through the breeze, disappearing into the black.
The archer looked to the gatekeeper as they both stood with silence as their armor. The archer asked, “Should we shout something?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Well, do we shout something at them, or should they have said something to us?”
The gatekeeper bit his lips, nodded at the archer, and then yelled out at the night, “Halt! Who goes there?!”
There was no response.
“Maybe they couldn’t hear us,” the archer suggested.
“I can’t even see them anymore. Did you see where your shot landed?”
“No. Maybe shout again.”
Again, the gatekeeper shouted, and again he was met with silence.
“Did you hit them?” The gatekeeper asked with a silent hope.
“…I suppose I could have.” He considered it for a moment. “Would that be a shame? If I did hit them? Maybe they were here for a truce, or maybe it was just locals. Oh, damn it all to Hell, did I just kill one of our scouts?”
Rather than reassure the archer, the gatekeeper continued to eye the darkness. His eyes could pierce through shadows themselves if he willed it, but it had been years since he had needed his eyes for anything more than casual convoys.
“I really hope I didn’t hit them. Do you think I did—”
Suddenly, racing through the night, an arrow emerged from the dark! The gatekeeper only spotted it as it sailed toward him, directly on route with his eyes! The archer ducked and closed his eyes, awaiting the screams of his companion which would be followed by the eventual slump of the dead corpse… only neither came!
Through shaking fingers, he peered out toward his partner.
The gatekeeper still stood, his face white as an undisturbed morning snow.
In front of his face, mere inches from his eyes, the arrow hovered in the air.
A voice came from below, shouting up at the two men on the wall, “Would you mind opening your gate? I’d hate to have stopped that arrow for nothing!”
---
One day before…
Hove awoke to the morning sun, warm against his face.
His night of drinking caught up to him, and his eyes felt under siege, along with all of his other senses. High above the city, still slumped atop the Grand Bell, Hove began to spill his guts.
“And I will never have another sip of that,” Hove spat, as he looked peacefully out at his city.
Two silhouettes.
The memory struck his mind with a fiercely quick swipe.
“No!” Hove stood and surveyed. He looked for smoke of burned buildings. He listened for the clanging of steel. He sniffed, afraid to smell the spilled blood of his people.
Yet nothing seemed different.
Actually, one thing did seem different, and it came from the main keep. The flags fluttering outside the grand entrance doors…
Hove looked at Goran, who drooled endlessly onto the catwalks. Lightly, Hove kicked at Goran, “Wake up, Goran!”
“Huh?” Goran shot up, and far too quickly. He repeated Hove’s actions, and threw up over the railings onto exactly the same place as Hove had just done. Wiping his mouth, “My head… What’s going on?”
Hove pointed at the main doors.
Goran’s eyes adjusted as he rubbed his head.
“Are those—?”
Hove answered, “You bet your ass they are!” Hove held back tears, “Someone has answered our call.”
The men looked at one another in shock, then they began to cheer and shout with joy, only to then clutch the railing once more as they emptied their stomachs.
---
Hove’s shoulder slammed the doors of the main keep open with a deafening BOOM!
As he entered, Hove’s mouth opened to speak with excitement, yet no words came out as he saw nothing.
King Pavo was absent. While there weren’t many guards left to maintain the keep, they also weren’t present. The flags outside of the keep implied a rescuer had arrived, yet nobody.
“Where could they be?”
Hove stepped inside the keep as the slow steps of Goran followed with delay. Pale in the face, heaving hefty and warm breaths, Goran slumped against a wall and prepared himself to throw up yet again, but he valiantly gained control of himself.
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Again, Hove questioned, “Where is anyone?”
Goran spoke between slow breaths, “How did you… run that distance… and you didn’t even… stop to puke?!”
Hove turned to his friend, “The banners are flowing this morning. Someone has arrived since last night,” he bit his lip, “where would Pavo take them?”
The two began to trek throughout Belle’s Hold, looking for signs of Pavo. They returned to the library, yet found it empty. Nobody was searching within the bookshelves anymore because every shelf had been emptied onto the floor. The two turned to the kitchens and dining halls as they followed their noses. While the King was not within the dining halls, Goran and Hove began to piece out some of the story together.
One guard recounted, “…so they lifted the gate for these two hucksters! While they weren’t selling anything, that was the impression that they gave off. Maybe a mix between vampires and grifters!”
Goran asked, “So you met them? The people who came to help us?”
“Me? No! I heard this from Jeromy.”
Then Goran and Hove found Jeromy a few tables away. “…of course I’d seen them!” Jeromy forked a potato chunk into his mouth. “Not only did I see them, I stared at them, for a good while too!”
Hove struggled to not roll his eyes. “Who were they?”
“Well, there was two of them you see? The first one - he seemed to be the leader, mainly because he just wouldn’t say nothing. He was all quiet-like, and he made me think of one of them ghouls that haunt the lower levels of our crypts.” Jeromy waggled his fingers as he spoke, “but the other one… he scared me even more! He was just outright using his Spark in front of us, so we just stared there all starstruck.”
Goran leaned in, “What was his Spark?”
“It’s hard to explain because it seemed to change all the time. He walked up to a door and touched his finger, so it opened. I’d heard of locksmithing Sparks before, but that was just our weapons door, so we don’t ever lock that door.” Jeromy drank some water. “Then he got up in someone’s face… I think it was that young Miss Halster, you know the newer guard from the spring’s batch of graduates?”
Goran nodded, wanting to hear every word he could about another Spark.
“Well, she started enforcing our rules on the two of them. She was saying, ‘We must have your identification!’ and things like that. That second guy wasn’t interested, so he poked the armor on her chest, and then that whole part of her armor started lifting her into the air. Now, her legs and arms were just free in the air, but it was only that part of her gear was pulling her up.”
Goran spoke to Hove, “Maybe he can make certain things move on command? Or maybe it’s the ability to erase the pull of gravity? I don’t know!” He was grinning ear-to-ear.
Hove interjected, “So where did these two go?”
Jeromy shrugged, “I just watched them enter and then they walked with some of Pavo’s guards who had gotten word of their entrance.”
Goran asked, “Did Officer Halster ever… come back down? Or is she still floating?”
Jeromy put a finger to his chin and appeared as if he was putting extra work into remembering the moment. “You know, now that you mention it… I don’t really remember if I even caught the end of that whole thing. She floated up and then I just got so fixated on them… I’m sure she came back down.”
Hove ran a hand over his head.
Goran and Hove moved throughout the tables, yet they couldn’t gather much more about the two individuals, nor where they vanished to following their animated entrance.
Goran resigned to a bowl of food, hoping to give his stomach a break.
Hove continued to search the palace, hoping to give his heart a break. He spoke to himself as he paced the empty halls, “Pavo, where are you? Who are these two strangers? Why have you not called for me yet?”
---
No Days Remain…
The night was swift, and it drowned the daylight in only moments.
Dusk was met with an unfortunately cruel silence, as the few remaining within Belle’s Hold could hardly hold onto their depleted sanity.
For hours, Hove had searched with a relentless fury for King Pavo, but he could find nothing. Or, even if he could find snippets from moments of eavesdropping, the stories were only wild speculation, yet there was a common undertone. “I haven’t seen them since last night!” “They went somewhere within the castle, but nobody has heard from them in hours!” “They say there are tunnels under the castle that lead south or north, maybe they took one of those?”
Midnight dinged out from the clocks of the kingdom, and their sound echoed out to the window of his room, where he sat looking out over the city.
“Fine!” Hove said angrily. “If you’ve gone and left us, then good riddance!” He felt a pang in his heart, and Hove knew there was no use hiding his true thoughts. "You’ve gone and left me, Pavo. Weren’t we friends? For decades now, was our friendship for nothing?”
Hove drank from a nearby bottle. With how much everyone had been drinking lately, there weren’t many high-shelf liquors or ales left. Each gulp burned his throat with ferocity.
“If I would have known,” Hove mumbled to himself, “I’d have run away and deserted you!”
Then, a loud bang slammed on his door. Hove launched himself out of the chair and answered the door. “The King! You’ve found him?”
The door opened to find some young man, maybe twenty years younger than Hove. “The King? No, Master Hove,” the young man sniffed the air, surely detecting the alcohol on Hove’s putrid breath. “I’ve been sent to find you! We need you at the main gate.”
“For what? Call Master Goran.”
“We’ve tried, but we couldn’t’ locate him.”
The young boy gulped as he continued.
“It is the Heir to the Blood. They’ve arrived.”
---
Hove smoothed out his jacket, making sure that his decorated uniform looked respectable and proud. The mud squished under his feet as he stomped his way toward the main gate. He nodded to a nearby guard posted atop the defensive outer walls.
A voice from nearby shouted, “Open the gate!”
Cranks and groans as wood creaked and stone strained the hefty doors open. Chains rattled and the torches flickered with licking laps of anxious embers.
Hoping nobody could notice, Hove’s breath was wavering. His deep breaths were interrupted by quick and terrified gasps and exhales.
The gates began to move, and Hove peered through the veil of night, hoping that the gods above were walking alongside him.
As he moved forward, Hove saw only one person. Sitting atop a horse, both rider and steed were adorned in terrifying armor. The helmet was as if two searing metal plates were fused together with the most unfocused design. The angles met with confusing corners and edges, and it seemed as if there was no possibility for a head to sit within the helmet without one’s skull being broken and cracked. The black metals had red lines wildly drawn or dripped along the piece. Likewise, the chest-piece and remaining suit followed the wild fashion. The metals fused in the most unimaginable patterns. Red paint was splattered wherever it had decided to fall. The horse was plated in occasional bursts of metal and paint, and Hove began to wonder if the red paint wasn’t sometimes mixed with actual blood.
He gulped one final moment of fear away. Standing tall, Hove refused to be the one to speak first. He didn’t want to play any cards or reveal anything he didn’t need to.
Silence swam its way between the two of them. Neither spoke. The horse chuffed and stomped its hoof occasionally as steam belched out its nostrils.
Finally, the rider descended, and it was as if lightning exploded. The metal clanged with each step as they stepped closer to Hove.
He could see now that this rider carried a wicked and horrible axe upon their back. It looked as if it was rotting with the stench of death, yet the metal seemed as sharp as ever.
Once they were only a few steps away, the rider’s hand moved to their side, and Hove hoped for a swift and painless death, yet that did not arrive.
Instead, the rider revealed a scroll, and a woman began to read aloud to Hove. Her voice was meant for him, and he doubted that even those at the gate could hear her speak.
“Attention! We are the Heir to the Blood, and we have come to fulfill our promises. While last we spoke, our demand was simple: The Book of Dodius has been demanded by our leaders. The Book of Dodius has been traced, and we know that it rests here, within the walls of Belle’s Hold. Do not try and deny this.
“We promised that no harm would come to you, as long as you relinquish this book.”
The woman looked toward Hove, and for the first time he could see the person within the metal. Her blue eyes peered at him, and the eyes hoped that the book was here, and this could all be over now.
She asked Hove directly, “Will you relinquish this book?”
Hove wondered at his answer. Surely there could be some perfect combination of words that would turn the tides of this evening. He remained quiet for a moment, but then he said, “I don’t have it. We have searched relentlessly, and we cannot find it.”
Immediately the woman turned back to her scroll and started to read, “As you have refused this plea deal, death will arrive at sunrise.”
Hove stepped forward to interrupt.
He put his hand out as if Hove could reason with the twisted metal, “I am the current ranking member of this city, I open our doors to you! You can search for this book for yourself.”
The rider stopped reading, and her eyes studied Hove, searching for some trap or hidden truth.
“So be it.” She rolled up her scroll and moved back to her steed. “At dawn, we will return. Do not attempt any escape or treachery. We sit amongst your people, and the Blood runs thick within this city.”
With a swift kick, her steed took off, galloping away into the night.
Hove watched her leave, tracing her image into the night as best as he could, but eventually she was lost to the darkness.
He turned back to the gate.
The Book of Dodius.
We sit amongst your people.
Where in this city were his friends hiding?