Dark Age (12 page)

Chapter 14

“
Y
ou cannot do
this,” I said as Yorick forced me toward the common-hall, “You know that you will face consequences the moment Terric gets back.”

“Shut up,” he said angrily, “I won’t face anything. A conflict between a big mouthed recruit and officer happens all the time. Nobody will take the recruit’s word over the second-in-command. Not even Terric.”

He waved two guards towards him, “Detain this recruit and bring him to the mines at sunset. Stay outside during the night and make sure he doesn’t run anywhere,” leaving us, he was almost out of reach when he turned around, “Feel free to take horses, but make him walk. Oh, and send a recruit to the stables to clean up the… eh… well it got a little messy.”

With a salute they confirmed his request and dragged me into the common-hall. Once they sat me down, I was not allowed to move.

For three hours I waited, watching them fill their stomachs with pork and beer. The two must have been Yorick’s personal henchmen. It has always been the talk among the recruits that one can work for him and get special rights or earn big sums of money. It was not easy getting in however. Whenever a recruit asked him openly about it in training he acted confused. Once, he claimed that they were all just stories that originated as a prank on him a couple years back. Observing the two guards, nothing else seemed plausible. They consumed rich foods casually like merchant sons, yet had the table manners and looks of industrial borns. As a member of the Guard, one earned a laughable single coin a day. Back when I worked for Eric, we made six hundred coins in less than two months. No Guard in their right mind would waste the little they had so meaninglessly.

At first I could not follow their conversation. I assumed it was the talk of two drunkards. But after a while I recognized patterns and meaning in the seemingly nonsensical mess. It was a simple code-language. Their talk, filled with jargon, was supposed to be for their ears only.

They discussed transporting rare resources like minerals, fruits, and medical herbs into the city. The merchants apparently paid them extra to get around the Inquisition’s taxation.

“Jeff’s been sticking his nose in the black zone. I think the lamb ought to know,” the skinnier one with salt and pepper locks said. “The harvest would be great.”

He suggested selling out a fellow guard that must have been snooping around in their shady businesses too much. ‘The lamb’ seemed to represent Yorick. What Terric gained in honest loyalty, Yorick made up through economic relations. Sadly, too often money trumped honesty. On the face we were all brothers and Grey Guardsmen. But some of us truly were just Yorick’s men, and it poisoned the very fabric that held us together. Much of the trust I held with the average man got lost in an ocean of caution and suspicion.

Despite my distaste for Yorick, something within me was intrigued by the whole enterprise. It radiated with rebellion which was still a fire that burned vividly in my heart. Especially the jobs reminded me of the thief jobs, my old life. In contrast however, I had always considered my work as acts of altruism. When I put my life at risk it was not for enrichment. It was to help the people from the Industrial District survive. This scheme however was driven by greed. And judging by the speed in which Yorick had killed the horse I had ridden, I felt certain that the savages and horses were not the only living things he had slain.

“Let’s go boy, we got a ride ahead of us,” said the bigger one with a flat nose. Like a prisoner they escorted me back to the stables. The dead horse had already disappeared and the blood stains vanished from the earth. Before mounting their horses they tied up my wrists to hold me by a leash.

What followed was one tedious journey. Yorick’s men took pleasure in leading me cross-country. The direct path to the mines would have taken half an hour at most. Even when the sun was already fading they still laughed at the whole enterprise. Every time I tripped they would pull on the leash, forcing me to the ground with bloody wrists. Whenever I complained, they rode faster, giving me the option of running or being dragged over the ground in excruciating pain.

When the darkness almost completely consumed me, a few lights illuminated the far distance. The soft flames of what appeared to be campfires highlighted the rough surface of the mountainside. The closer we came, the more defined the scene grew.

The still image turned into a lucid film of ancient nostalgia. Flames danced around in circles and shone brightly, throwing long and thick shadows behind the guards around it. One standing guard threw a shadow like that of a giant onto the face of the mountain. With every step it became more vivid. The men were singing songs, while two jumped joyfully to the quick and lively tunes of another’s flute.

From a safe distance they got off the horses. Carefully the skinny guard tied them to a lonely tree, while Flatnose cut me loose, revealing the many burn marks on my wrists. Each grabbed me by a shoulder and pushed me towards the mine.

The camp grew cautious the moment they caught a glimpse of our shapes. The music stopped and the men slowly put their hands on the grips of their swords as they rose to their feet.

“Show yourself,” growled a familiar voice. From within the group appeared Constantine who had pulled his sword halfway out of the sheath, to caution whoever was approaching.

“Put the sword back, we are delivering this recruit. Direct order from Master Yorick,” responded Flatnose.

When the light of the campfire illuminated us, another guard came forth, “Did Master Terric approve this order?” asked Stephan, “You know as well as me that Adam Blacksmith is Master Terric’s protégé. I would not mess around with him if I were you.”

“Master Terric is not here. As of now, Master Yorick is first-in-command and his orders are the law of the Guard. Now step aside, or we will have to use force,” responded my captor harshly while Flatnose pulled his sword out.

“Very well,” Constantine said and stepped aside. Stephan looked at me visibly concerned as I was pushed past him. We left the guards behind us, and delved into the dark abyss of the mines.

The air thickened, taking up a violently sharp stench. The gases, I thought, could be incensed at any moment by the flickering torches along the walls. An uncomfortable heat spread among the three of us. Flatnose kept moving his collar to let some air dry off the sweat that formed on his back. It seemed so implausible that men like my father worked here for nine years and made it out alive. The heat and suffocating air were unbearable, but the narrowness frightened me the most. The deeper we delved into the cave, the closer the walls moved in on us.

After taking several turns I had lost my orientation.

The guards stopped and looked at one another. Flatnose turned towards me, “When you find your way out, you are free to go. If you aren’t out by the time Terric gets back, we’ll come looking for you. Good luck, and wash yourself when you get back.”

“But we can’t make it that easy for you,” the other said as his fist flew out at me.

I awoke in the middle of the maze. The faint memories of the turns we took had vanished with the hard blow to my head. My fingers investigated the throbbing bruise above my left temple.

I sat on the floor for a moment, clearing my head and waiting for the pain to go away. As the minutes passed I pushed myself onto my feet and started walking. I had no idea where I was going, but I knew I had to go somewhere to get out of this hole. At the end of the hallway a fork opened up three new hallways. Arbitrarily I picked the left hall and ran down its full length, until it offered me a new set of choices.

Every hall had at least one torch to illuminate it. Without their light one would be lost in dead space. Sometimes a torch had burned down and I began to crawl on my knees to make sure that I would not bump my head against the low ceiling. At last I found a burning torch and grabbed it from the wall to guide my way out of the tunnel system. I must have been close to the exit.

It felt as if hours had passed, yet I had no way of telling what time of day it was. It could have been the same night, but it might as well have been the next day already.

After a while my lungs began to fight me. The running forced me to breathe heavily, bringing more and more of the toxins that rested in the air into my system. I collapsed onto my back, holding the torch just far enough away from me to not set my clothes on fire. The flame flickered scarily and created a constant cycle of light and darkness. The moment it cast its light upon the cave it was immediately swallowed by the vast darkness surrounding it. This almost theatrical back and forth made the room seem even smaller than it had been.

A sudden panic ceased me. I feared that if I would not leave right then, the walls of the cave would consume me. I jumped onto my legs and began to run. My lungs were pumping and my heart was beating to the rhythm of my feet. Haphazardly I made turns at every fork obliterating any possibility of orientation. The torches got fewer and fewer, yet I kept running. Something told me to turn around, but I just kept running into the dark abyss, hoping for a light at the end of the tunnel.

I turned left with my legs extending like those of a deer fleeing from its predator, when I suddenly tripped over something on the floor. With all my left-over speed I tumbled against the wall of a dead end tunnel.

Struck by pain, I cringed. My knee was cut open and began to bleed. The torch had fallen out of my hand during the collision and rolled across the cold floor. Lifting my eyes towards it, I saw what had laid in my way. A skeleton in full armor rested against the wall. The armor was not one of the Grey Guard. Much of the fabric had been consumed by time, but I could still make out a symbol that had been untouched. In the center of the chest was a closed gate with an open eye across it. Emerging from the top of the gate stood a cross and at the bottom hung a pickaxe.

I picked up the torch and began to explore the dead end room. A small chest rested to his side, closed shut with a thick iron lock that looked unbreakable. On the ground I could still see the black markings of where the stranger must have once had his fire every night. Across from him was an old wooden chair. The way his skeleton lay there it seemed as if he had been sitting on the throne until he collapsed onto the floor in his dying moments.

In amazement I sat down on his former throne and examined the room. Before my eyes I could see it all flashing. Light, life and sound. The mysterious stranger that once lived here. Roasting his dinner over the fire, singing songs, reading a book, dreaming of what life would be like in a hundred years. Now all was dark, dead and silent.

Suddenly my eyes caught an irregularity in the wall. I rose from the throne and brushed my fingers over a crack. The dead end was man made. Across the whole width of the tunnel spanned one gigantic gate that was made of stone, iron and wood. A thick wooden blockade kept the door shut, fortified by a lock and iron knob beneath it. Curiosity drove me forward yet fear held me back. I looked around me. Ahead lay the door, but behind me was nothing but the skeleton and my own trail of blood.

For all I knew monsters, demons, or nothing at all could have awaited me beyond the door, so I turned back to the unknown stranger that had been waiting for me for decades perhaps. My eyes drifted over every inch of his body. His left hand clasped something. Carefully without breaking off his bones I pulled a small paper from his hand. What I found on its back was the smallest and most detailed painting I had ever seen. In the torchlight I saw the image of a woman with her arms around what seemed to be her daughter. They were smiling so purely, that the love was radiating from their eyes through the paper onto me. It must have been his wife and child, I thought. Something about the picture put me off however. Their clothes, perfectly fitted and symmetrical, as well as the room they were in made it look like they were from another world. The kitchen that was visible behind them was not made of wood or stone like ours. Most things were made of metal, and tiny lights shone from many objects, that I had no knowledge of naming. The only familiar thing I noticed was a golden cross dangling around the wife’s neck. I tried to find answers, explanations, anything useful, but it was all just strange and inexplicable.