People were buying less and less, and yet the caravans kept rolling in with their cargo. Consistently, day or night, the warehouses were at least half manned. Edeard watched them work from a chimney across the Ichabod, the channel that bisected Ralagast. The worst part was, they worked without looking over their shoulder. He saw their lips move frequently. Conversation, smiles, laughter, whistling. These common men thought all this was business as usual. He adjusted his farglass. A boat had rowed up and parked beneath the channel’s basin wall beside the warehouse. A foreman called the workers in for a break, and a drink by the looks of the barrels they were tapping into behind him. The tired men needed no other encouragement, leaving their work on pause where it was. As they left, a caravan pulled up with its sides overlooking the river. The sides of the cars unfolded. Figures in dark clothing slipped out of them, then climbed down onto the boat with wooden crates in their arms.
“What the hell…” Edeard muttered.
He compressed his farglass. Priming his feet, he sprang into movement. His cloak warped the air around him, bending light. On the ground and under the constrast of the gas lamps, no one saw a caped shadow fly from rooftop to rooftop. The shadow eventually stopped on an apartment block near the river, just as the boat was passing by. Edeard followed its path for hours until he no longer could. The boat had slipped into the sewage tributaries: labyrinthine constructions beneath the city.
Edeard left the rooftops. He opened a sliver into Deglass, the plane of reflections, a simple Enchantment that enveloped him in shimmer, making him very nearly invisible. He traced his back along the basin wall into the under city. He was careful to never expose even the edge of his face to the boat. Instead, he followed the ripples in the water the paddles left behind, only turning the corner when he was sure there was no line of sight between the boat and him.
Not many have been down there in ages. The brick walls were cracked. Some parts of the walkways were beginning to sink into the turbulent current. The Lord Mayor had once said, ‘A city has two graveyards. One is honored, the other none could bear to acknowledge.’ Edeard wondered if this was the other. The whole place smelled of expulsion and death. He followed still, relying now on the meager lamplight from the boat; they had moved too deep into the undercity for his eyes to adjust. But soon he began hearing activity growing louder than the rushing waters. And his eyes were beginning to be of use again.
The boat had stopped around the corner. Edeard tapped his ears, casting a tiny, parabolic Spell. He daren’t cast anything more complex, lest they detect the planes tearing into this world. Conversation was amplified, including the ruffling and other many little movements people didn’t notice they made as they talked.
“…recruits?”
“Going well.” The boat rocked. Water sloshed. People were getting off. The side of the boat scraped against the dock. Crates were being lifted. “This whole recession has gotten a lot of young folk desperate. Like I told him, youth is malleable.”
“We’ll talk at the summit. Is it all here?”
“One hundred Hrimner devices. Do you have a range?”
“‘ver ‘ere.”
The boat rocked one more time, then began to move again. Edeard gathered his cape and ducked into a pipe. The water felt cold rushing past his boots. An ephemeral lantern’s glow briefly lit the current, then faded again. The boat had gone. He stepped out and went to the dock. Cold dread chilled his blood.
Whoever these insurgents were, they had built something here in the undercity. They must have been here for months. The dock was an entrance leading to underground halls. Edeard leapt up onto the ceiling supports, avoiding the many gas lamps that hung from tendrils off the rafters. From there, he watched hundreds of people being trained in wooden obstacle courses resembling the architecture of the city. There were even kitchens to feed all those men and women. No. They were not much more than boys and girls. Plans ran wild in his mind. This world haven’t invented a camera. How was he supposed to prove this operation to the Knight’s Guard without sending alarms down here? Then he wised up. What if they already have people in the Guard? In the greater government? There was only a short list of people in the mayoral palace he could trust.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
For now, he had to find out what those machines were. As if on cue, the ceiling trembled. Loosened lines of dust fell. The lamps shook in their housing. He followed the ventilation openings to the source of the shaking. Two men stood alone in a long room with targets at the end. One held a brass colored contraption that looked designed for the human grip. The tool had a glass ball containing a single crystal. The glass ball fed its energies into a tubular machine through a mess of pipes. But he could tell instantly what it was meant to do. The man below aimed again. When his finger depressed the trigger, Hrimner—the plane of static barriers—tore open. A red bolt flew at lightning speed to a target dummy at the end of the room. The bullet shaped barrier collapsed on impact, expanding and dissipating into a frictional shockwave. The dummy was incinerated at the same time it was being torn apart. What remained was a smoking crater on the wall behind the target and a thin shower of burning fragments. The man holding the weapon laughed.
Edeard imagined one hundred frustrated young men and women hell-bent on revolution with these devices in their arms. He needed to leave. Now. He had to find his friends at the palace. They had to know. He prepared to leave. Then an idea occurred to him. His eyes fell on the crates at the back of the room. In that very moment, the two men were engaged in further discussion. Distracted. Edeard flexed his fingers.
--
Jorge officially met Lisŗa when they camped for the night. He ate alongside them, even helped where he could with his bare heads; they sure as hell weren’t going to give him tools. Dinner was white bread and soup. It was enough for Jorge. He hadn’t felt the hunger for a long time. Meanwhile, Lisŗa would ask all sorts of questions about him. About his past. Where he came from. What it was like. His answers grew shorter and shorter as the night wore on. Finally, the young lady asked, “So you can’t be hurt by blade, right?”
“It’s probably better to say most don’t have the strength.”
“Can I try?”
He shrugged. “Sure.” He held out his arm.
Lisŗa unsheathed her dagger and rested the edge on Jorge’s extended forearm. In one quick motion she sliced. June looked away. Lisŗa’s eyes widened.
“You’re right,” she said. “That is crooked.”
Jorge withdrew his arm with a furrow on his face. There was no blood, but the uppermost layer of his skin had been parted. He turned his gaze to the Scoutrunner, his eyes examining her thin physique.
“How hard did you try just now?” He asked.
“Pretty hard,” Lisŗa replied.
“You really were trying huh.” He addressed June, who avoided the scene by staring at her soup bowl. “Do you know anything about uh Form? The body? Whatever it’s called.”
“Medically? Sure, a little,” June said lightly, glad the contest was over.
“Do you know people with extraordinary strength?”
“You mean at those travelling performances? Some of them can lift a small horse!”
“I mean people like me.”
“I suppose there are legends of heroes in our history that were larger than life. They’re always strange in demeanor, and incredibly powerful. And—”
“Otherworldly,” Jorge said.
“I guess.” Light gathered in June’s eyes. “Wait. You don’t mean.”
“In Five Thousand Feathers, almost all the heroes came from ‘a land far away’. I’m wondering if that’s less than metaphor. Maybe these heroes are people like me. People from other places.”
“Well, your Soul is highly irregular, that’s for sure.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well…” June thought of the words. “Do you know why for every million folk, there’s only ever one efficacious king, be they good or evil? There’s a balance to things.”
“Metaphorically?”
“No, in actuality. The Order refers to it as the Unconscious God, because to be awake and perform this role is to exhibit bias. A village cannot have a hundred chiefs. Just one who was meant for the job, and whoever happens to be attempting the job. For every thousand mages only one may have the talent to be an Invocateer. The world would be in ruins if everyone could be a king or a puissant caster.”
“What about those, what do you call them, Highcas—?”
“We shouldn’t talk about them,” June said. She sighed. “They are what happens when an Invocateer lives too long, and learns too much. People aren’t meant to have such long lives.”
“I thought life mattered to you, no matter the length.”
“Life matters because it ends, Jorge,” June enunciated. “When you amass too much… time. Things start to look different. My Archbishop showed me. It becomes cold. For everyone else.”
“What does my Soul look like then, under your sight?”
“Receptive. Open to growth. The Unconscious God never allotted you a place in the balance because you were never born here.”
“Figures.” Jorge finished up his meal. He left them, perhaps unceremoniously, to more pleasant conversations while he cleaned up.
All in all, he had learned nothing. He remembered the forces that dragged him and a number of his compatriots from Earth to this planet. It was conscious alright. Someone out there needed people like him, outside the system and with all the advantages that came with, to be a part of Etrylis. Ralagast was only a handful of days away. It was supposedly a bigger city, older and more developed. There had to be answers there.