(46) The Time Is Near
Redra stepped softly around the bend, carefully rolling her feet from heel to toe. As a princess, she was never required to step lightly about the palace, but princesses also drew attention, and that was something she did not want.
The swish of her long dress dragging behind had her constantly on edge, but it was a necessary concession. Her etiquette instructors would have words for her, should they find her roaming the public portion of the palace in flats. The dress would hide them, and the noise it made was much softer than the clacking of heels.
Still, she glanced around and, finding no one nearby, hiked her dress up, quickening her pace.
She pushed the door at the end of the hall open quietly, slithering through it.
“Gods, it’s just you,” Morwynn sighed, relaxing her stance.
“You look like you were prepared to fight whoever walked through this door if it wasn’t me,” Redra mused.
Morwynn’s cheeks colored, and she clasped her hands behind her back.
“I would not. It is simply my knightly instinct to take a defensive stance when surprised,” she justified.
“Is it your knightly instinct to be surprised by the only door in the room opening when you were already expecting me to enter it?” Redra teased.
Morwynn stared silently for a few moments before coughing into her hand.
“Were you successful?” she asked.
Redra smiled, presenting the parchment, excited enough to go along with Morwynn’s obvious change of subject.
“By order of the king,” she read, “Princess Redra Sardvar, accompanied by her Knight Attendant, Morwynn Gestalt, shall journey across the sea on a diplomatic mission to Promise City of Ashreach. There, she will present to Marquis Douglas and facilitate relations between the Royal Family of the Sardvend Kingdom and the Marquisate of Radaar.”
Morwynn smiled slightly as she listened to the missive.
“A complete success, then?” she asked.
“Well, mostly…” Redra hinted, wrinkling her nose as she carefully rolled the parchment.
“What went wrong? It sounds exactly like what we wanted,” Morwynn said.
“What went wrong is—” Redra started, but the door behind her suddenly opened with a loud bang!
“What went wrong is that I’m comin’ too,” Esmerelda bellowed jovially, entering the room as if she owned it and slapping a hand on Redra’s back.
“Archmage Esmerelda! It is a pleasure to see you. Might I inquire—” Morwynn started, her posture rigid and proper.
“Ah, drop the formalities, kid. We’re about to spend weeks travelin’ together. I’ll go insane if I have to listen to court-talk the whole way. Just call me Esme.
“And to answer your question, I’m here because squirt—” she said, patting Redra once again on the shoulder, “couldn’t get her trip sanctioned without leaning on Big Brother Rodward’s authority, and he wasn’t content sending his only sister to Ashreach with only a sixteen-year-old knight for protection.
“Fortunately, yours truly just happened to be nearby,” she finished with a satisfied smile.
“You were following me and eavesdropping,” Redra grumbled, shaking Esme’s hand off her shoulder.
“Semantics. If I were a formal bodyguard, you’d have no ground for those accusations. As it stands, I’m in charge of your magic training, and when you shirk it, it’s my job to find out why,” Esme explained, waving a hand dismissively.
“It will be an honor to have you accompanying us, Archmage Esme,” Morwynn said, bowing slightly.
“...it’s gonna take a while for you, huh?” Esme asked with a sigh, deflating.
Redra was mildly annoyed. Dealing with a ‘guardian’ was not in her plans, but she could not deny that Esme would be her pick if she were forced to have one.
Normally, a member of the royal family would travel with a legion of soldiers in a train dozens of carts long. Being that she aimed to travel stealthily, such a thing was unacceptable. It is true that having a powerhouse like Esme fulfill the role instead was ideal, even if Redra would have preferred to go alone.
Besides that, everything had gone according to plan, so she really had nothing to complain about.
“Make sure you pack for everything, kiddos. I’ve only been to Ashreach once, but you can find every climate in the world there, and if you’re wipin’ sweat off your face or shivering, you aren’t watching for threats. Anything can kill you in Ashreach, from the land itself to the flora and, especially, the fauna,” Esme lectured.
“Yes, yes. We have read much on the subject,” Redra assured, ushering the woman out.
It was going to be a long trip, but this was an opportunity for her in more ways than one, and she aimed to capitalize on every one of them.
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A man entered the shop, not glancing at either the patrons or staff as he slid behind the counter. His hood was raised, his face obscured.
He moved through the storage room to the back, weaving around crates and barrels and sacks of all sorts. The general store catered to all, and its stock reflected as much.
A brick house of a man nodded at him as he reached the door in the back, made of thick wood and strengthened with steel struts. The man-house opened it for him, and he began the long descent down the stone steps, spiraling around for what must have been hundreds of feet of elevation.
Eventually, he reached the bottom and stood before a solid wall of stone bricks, as if the tunnel simply ended. He held his hand out before him, opening it and revealing a hexagonal prism about the size of his thumb. It was made of dull silver steel, yet as he held it aloft, blue tracings began to glow across its surface.
With a flash, the tracings glowed brightly enough to illuminate the room, igniting a similarly intricate pattern along the wall, which glowed a subtle blue in sympathy with the prism. They both darkened after only a moment, and what appeared to be a wall of stone began to open inward, splitting down the middle.
The man pocketed the prism and strode through the stone wall-gate, which closed silently behind him, the bricks seeming to lock together, as if pulled by a magnet.
He strode to a wooden railing and leaned against it, staring out over a cavernous expanse that seemed half-natural and half-constructed. A rushing waterfall poured across the rocks on the left side of the chamber, pooling into a river that raced through a hole with a steel grate covering it.
The moisture made the air humid, though not uncomfortable. The chamber was large enough that the water served only to counterbalance the myriad braziers and torches illuminating the chamber’s right side.
Wood scaffolding and supports crawled across all the walls not occupied by the waterfall, holding the rock in place and also providing extra surface area for storage and the dozens of people littered throughout the cave.
“Jace is here!”
“He’s back!”
The man, Jace, began to hear murmurs as he gazed down into the cavern below, his presence noted. A crowd began to gather as he watched and listened, all eyes in this grotto watching him.
Once he was sure he had everyone’s attention, he spoke.
“My fellow wastrels, vagabonds, and reprobates, I bring good tidings. Our plan is in motion, and the time draws near. We have secured the Count's support. I spoke to his chamberlain just days ago, and already our distribution has doubled.
“The Rennet is nigh, and now is the time for courage. Remember this: change does not come without chaos. But this chaos will be of our making. It will support our cause. And when it fades, it will leave behind a better world, for all of us.
“Inspire the Rennet!” he shouted, pumping a fist to the ceiling.
“Inspire the Rennet!” came the shouted response, echoed by dozens of voices.
The cavern rang with raucous cheering and the sounds of merrymaking, though Jace knew that no one would go overboard. They eked out a living down here, but they had nothing in abundance.
The Rennet came before all else.
He moved through the camp, shaking hands and waving as he went, finally drawing his hood down to reveal a slender face and pointed nose. His dark hair framed his brown eyes, which glowed amber in the torchlight, ambition and purpose plain in their reflection.
A small boy bumped into him as he walked, his vision obscured by the clay pot he carried, nearly as large as his entire body.
“Whoa there, Daniel,” Jace said, placing a hand on the boy’s shoulder to steady him.
“Sorry, Jace…” Daniel said, his eyes on the floor.
“Is something wrong?” Jace asked, taking the pot from him and setting it down.
“I don’t know…I been hearin’ the adults talkin’. They say we’s doin’ a bad thing. They say the dirt ruins people’s lives,” he said, still staring at the ground.
Jace crouched down so they were eye level and put both hands on the boy’s shoulders. Daniel looked up, finally making eye contact with him.
“Daniel, they’re right. Dirt does ruin lives,” he said plainly.
The boy’s eyes widened, and he glanced at the pot he’d been carrying, wary, as if it might bite him.
“You know whose lives it ruins?” Jace asked, squeezing the boy’s shoulders slightly.
Daniel shook his head, returning his gaze to meet Jace’s.
“People who have lives to be ruined. We do not have those; we never have. We are the underclass, Daniel—the lessers. The people who indulge in dirt, who can afford it, wouldn’t look twice if they saw our corpses lining the sides of their gilded streets. They’d only wonder why our bodies hadn’t been disposed of yet,” Jace explained with a grimace.
Daniel looked down at the floor again, obviously unsettled. Jace knew a child might not understand his every word, but the feeling of being below, lesser, was one he knew that all in this place understood, independent of age.
“Have you ever seen construction, Daniel?” Jace asked.
Daniel looked up at him, shaking his head with obvious confusion at the sudden topic change.
“Sometimes, you have a building—a house, let’s say—that is in such disrepair that the only way to fix it is to tear it down. You have to rebuild it from the ground up. This is what we have to do, Daniel. We have to tear down this establishment that knocks and keeps us down.
“The house we will build in its place will be grand, wondrous, but it won’t happen unless we knock down the rotting, dilapidated house first,” he explained, giving Daniel’s shoulders another squeeze.
“So, when you start thinking about ruining people’s lives, think about everyone here, your family, your friends, their parents—think about everyone here whose lives are already ruined, and stay strong.
“Courage isn’t about not being scared or being reluctant. It’s about being scared and reluctant and doing what needs to be done regardless. Can you do that, Daniel? Can you be courageous?” Jace asked, a twinkle in his eyes.
Daniel’s expression firmed, his jaw tightening. He nodded, picking up the pot with renewed vigor and nearly running down the path, continuing on his way.
Jace smiled, standing and striding through the camp until he reached his house. A structure of simple craftsmanship, it was little more than a wooden A-frame, a single story, and not more than 200 square feet on the inside.
He entered from the front, closing the deadbolt behind him, and moved toward the opposite wall. The structure was built against the cavern wall, and the back of the house was made of exposed stone, as if the home were merely resting against the wall.
He presented his prism once again, and after a smaller flash of glowing etchings, a door no more than six feet tall opened, the sheer stone splitting and rotating on unseen hinges.
Jace walked for several minutes through the darkness. He brought no torch or candle to light the way, for he knew the steps no matter the illumination.
He reached a spherical chamber suffused with a subtle green glow, casting long shadows across the room. Its source was an urn that sat upon a smooth stone table carved into the far wall of the chamber.
Tracings similar to those on the prism were etched into its surface, yet they were so fine that the urn appeared simply to glow a uniform green from a distance.
Jace put his palm atop the urn and closed his eyes. He began to speak, his voice filling the room.
“The time is near. The count is cooperating. His greed will be his downfall, but he will fulfill his role first. After that, I will have to rely on you, master,” he said.
The urn pulsed slightly, the green glow brightening ever so slightly before an eerie, disembodied voice floated about the chamber, rasping and dry, as if the hoarse cough of a decaying corpse.
Whispers filled the space, incoherent, unintelligible. They seemed sourceless, bouncing off the thick chamber walls, scratching at any ears willing to listen.
Jace smiled.