Chapter 122: King
"I thought you might say something like that. I've met young men before, you know. I actually used to be one. Young men don't usually think about the future. Not really. They might think about what the future could be but never about what the future eventually must be. It's how it goes."
"So what should I do? Do you know that?" Marco asked.
"Nobody knows that. Half of the question I can only give you secondhand. I've seen people who came back, safe and sound. Rich. Powerful. They settle down, usually quietly. They seem happy enough. I've asked more than one of them directly if they are happy. They've said yes."
Marco took a deep breath and leaned against the wall. "And the other half?"
"The other half nobody can ask. They sailed out and never came back. I've read about them, and I've heard stories. I've even seen them leave on their last trips. But they got to the same decision point everyone does, and after that, nobody saw them again."
"Maybe they just died. People get sunk."
"They do. But you and I have both felt that choice inside us. You've just been ignoring yours. I couldn't ignore mine anymore." Kuzai raised his hands in resignation. "The way I see it, you are on a different timeline than most people. Things are happening quicker for you. Even talking to a king seems like a normal thing to you, now. I just figured I'd get you thinking about it sooner rather than later."
Kuzai shrugged and walked off, waving over his shoulder as he went. "Good luck out there."
As patient as the king's servant was, he was all business as soon as Marco got back. He waved the crew forward and took the lead as he walked through the city at a brisk, stat-driven pace. Marco could have blown him out of the water on speed, but for an inner ocean dweller, this man was no slouch.
The city was something else. Every few steps brought them into range of another sparkly little wonder. Here there was an impossibly beautiful building, there was a perfectly sculpted fountain, and there was a stand of sparkly, conventional, completely unenchanted jewelry. Marco offered to buy some for Aethe, the King's schedule be damned. They were just normal diamonds and rubies, and he could have just about bought the stand. She had no interest in them, and they moved on.
Soon enough, the palace came into view. Or, rather, the palace compound did. It was big enough to be a good-sized settlement unto itself. There were towers that put the rest of the town to shame, huge buildings outside the palace that qualified as massive mansions all by themselves. The design made it clear that this was a regal place, a place from which governance happened, but it wasn't nearly as fancy as Marco would have thought. He expected gold, somehow. He got stone and ivy.
"The palace isn't as old as it looks." The servant offered all by himself. "The main building is about a generation old, and the entire appearance of it has been altered. The overseer took it over from the previous ruler of this region when he… attacked, I suppose you'd say."
"What?" The entire crew was pulled out of their awe of the building at once as he dropped that bomb. "When he attacked?"
"Oh, yes. It's a celebrated day in our history. I'm too young to remember, but the last overseer was apparently a real piece of work. A real bad guy. They celebrated for a week when the Overseer took him down, which I guess was hard because there wasn't much in the way of food."
"Wow." Marco's next words slipped out before he could think about them. "I wonder if that's when he took the temple."
The jolt in the crew when he mentioned the temple and laid their hand out in the open on the table was palpable. It was a mistake, to be sure, the kind of slip of the tongue that caused trouble. There had been situations in all of their lives when mentioning a temple like that might just have gotten them killed.
The assistant bulldozed over it like it was the most normal thing ever said.
"Of course it was. He reversed the flow of it that day, set the agriculture of the entire island right within a week, and since then it's been a paradise. A real paradise. Or so I hear. I've never known anything different. Oh, here we are. Go through these doors, up the stairs, and into the big black doors on the left. He'll be in there, waiting for you."
"You aren't coming?" Elisa asked. "Upstairs?"
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"Oh, no. The Overseer didn't ask me to. He's a very exact man. He would have asked if he had wanted. You're fine, though. It will be hard to get lost. Nice to meet you folks, anyway, and I hope you enjoy the city!"
"I can't tell if he's very good at his job or just incapable of disobeying." Aethe said. "He reminds me of an elf, in that way."
"I like him. What do you guys think of there not being any guards at this door? Or at this building in general. It's weird, right? Even Quill had his men."
"Maybe he doesn't need guards," Marco said. "Not everyone does."
"Most heads of state do, I think." Elisa reached for the handle of the door and pulled it open a crack. "Either nobody wants to attack this man, or nobody can, or he doesn't mind if they do."
The door swung open. It was a massive slab of wood, but it moved silently and smoothly on its hinges as if they had been oiled by magic. They went through into a room that was finally as fancy as Marco expected a ruler's palace to be. A white marble staircase was framed by two doors, neither of which could have been less expensive than a backpack full of gold. They were jeweled, gilded, and looked as heavy as a boulder. The bannisters for the staircase were some dark, heavy, expensive-looking wood carved over every inch of it.
They clomped up the stairs. It was hard to do silently. Their boots clicked on the marble the whole way up.
"I guess we won't be surprising anyone," Riv said. "Not that we'd want to."
"No, we wouldn't. We couldn't anyway, if you think about it." Elisa traced her fingers over a bit of carved bone that topped the end of the banister. "We were invited, after all."
The big black doors were big and black, but not temple-black. They were wood, not stone. They were of normal enough design; they had hinges and they had knobs. The crew turned those knobs and walked into the brightly lit room beyond.
In that room, at a writing desk, was a very old man. He wasn't just old in the way that Kuzai was, or as old as Tatric was. This was a man on his way out. Whatever he had once been, his body was now a wisp of that. He was wrinkled, nearly bald, and sitting so far back in his chair Marco doubted for a moment that he could have sat up if the chair wasn’t holding him up.
“Thank you for coming. As you can see, I’m not much of a threat to you, even if I wanted to be. You should feel free to relax. Or not, if that suits you better.” He motioned to four chairs set across from his desk. ”Sit, or don’t. Up to you.”
“I’ll sit,” Marco said. “But I’d appreciate you telling me what this is about as soon as possible.”
“Oh, that’s easy. I’ve held this territory for many decades. I’ve made it thrive. I’m fairly proud of that. Now I’m going to die, and I’d rather you claimed my temple before I did.”
“I can’t kill you, if that’s what you are asking.” Marco didn’t know what the old man was up to with absolute certainty, but he knew whatever it was, it wasn't murder. This was too much trouble for murder in a way that wasn’t making murdering them any easier. “You aren’t even trying to kill us.”
“Luckily, that won’t be necessary,” the old man said. “It’s more a matter of abdication. You can look forward to learning that word later when the system starts bothering you about it. It will be your first sign you are getting older.”
“You mean you’d just give it to him?” Elisa tapped the table. “Just like that? No questions asked? Not knowing a thing about him?”
“Oh, I’d know more than you think. This is my empire, remember. I have ships that go here and there and observe things. One of them went to that outpost after you left. I heard a good bit about what kind of people you are.”
“And that is?” Aethe asked.
“The kind that adventure for the sake of it, if I have my guess right. I used to be that way. Every new island was a new excitement. Every boat might have been trying to kill me. Not that they ever got close enough to do it.”
“You had an artillery ship?” Marco’s eyes lit up despite himself. “I thought about going that way.”
“Oh yes. More cannon than wood. It’s still tucked away on a dock somewhere.” The old man coughed into his hand a bit and took a drink of water from a nearby glass to steady himself. “I never did get married while I was out there, though. Good on you two.”
“Thanks,” Aethe said. “I figured I’d better get it done before we both get killed.”
“Good thinking. Now, I’m going to tell you everything you likely know about temples so you don’t feel like you are revealing anything to me. They are big black buildings made by some ancient folk who were different from us in some ways. They might not have had the system, but the system recognizes them. You found your first one more or less on accident, either by stumbling into it or finding a map.”
“That’s…” Riv looked to Elisa. So did Marco and Aethe, for that matter. If Riv was their break-the-ice guy, she was their tactical speaker. This situation was foreign enough that nobody was willing to move forward without her approval.
“Oh, don’t worry about confirming any of this just yet. Now, after you found your first temple, it led you to another and another. Each one joined with the last, like tying two pieces of rope together until you had a bit of a net, covering a territory. That net is making you stronger all the time.”
“More or less,” Elisa said. “That’s been our experience.”
“Mine too.” The Overseer’s eye twinkled. “Though I haven’t added any rope to my net in quite some time. My advisors ask me not to. Now, you’ve also seen that there’s a nice way and a not-so-nice way to use some temples, I’d guess. When I got mine, it was in the hands of some… oh, I wouldn’t call him a monster, exactly. Wouldn’t be nice to the monsters. Name of Kidas. He had built up a little kingdom on this island and managed to fill it with unhappy, starving people. That was the bad side of this temple, you see. It can pull the potential out of food plants, like a tax on every crop. The more his people tried to feed themselves, the more he could steal, and the stronger he got.”
“Nasty,” Marco said. “How’d you get him?”