The King's Blood (18 page)
Authors: S. E. Zbasnik,Sabrina Zbasnik
His boots stepped heavily to the ground as he slid towards the lunch fire, his hands extended to the flames. Ciara didn't hear him, she was engrossed in trying to get mustard stains out of a pair of socks. Rubbing them violently and cursing in enough Dunlaw to make her father blush in shame, she jumped almost a foot when the weathered hand landed on her shoulder.
"Forgive the intrusion, but I couldn't help overhear your colorful vocabulary. Is there some problem that only a ketocher can help with?" He had a heavy pair of spectacles, frosted over with a warm red, obscuring his eyes.
Ciara turned beet red at the old man repeating a word that would have gotten her trachea cleaned out with soap, and lifted the sock in her hands toward him, "It's Assbert's laundry. The man must live inside a condiment jar."
"Assbert? Ah Asper, yes he does seem to favor coating mustard on everything, especially himself. But, why are you doing his laundry?"
Her mouth fell open at that. "Because he told me to," sounded stupid. "Someone had to do it," sounded defeatist. "I'm eating it secretly at night," sounded insane. Instead, she gurgled a bit and waved the sock around, the red spectacles never shifting off her.
"I see," the Chancellor said softly to her. Lifting his warm hand off her shoulder, he shifted towards the bustling caravans and called out to his fellows as graciously as he could, "Get your lazy, widening bums out here!"
A terrifying calm descended across the clearing at the normally soft leader's outburst. Slowly, doors swung open and robes descended, far brighter than they'd been in years thanks to the girl also rising to her feet. Even Aldrin poked his nose out, a small clay tablet hanging around his neck with a short sentence about a rather quirky fox jacking over a lispy god. It didn't look like it'd been a good day for the boy king.
The Chancellor clapped his hands once, drawing attention from the ten other curious heads crowding around him. "You think yourself above the rules of our order? You believe you have earned the right to shirk the duties our university's forebears laid down in blood and ink?"
The younger ones, their initiation still stinging when it rained, shook their heads violently. The older ones, the rules fading into a hazy memory of something they recited while jamming fish into their throats while standing in an outhouse shook their heads fuzzily, trying to clear afternoon cobwebs.
"No, Sir!" Chance, called out, even though neither he nor his brother had reached the point of taking said vows. At least not until either could manage to sign their own name.
"So you say, yet here you are trying to weasel out of the most respected of our traditions. What is cleanliness next to?" he asked, slapping his left hand hard into his right.
"Astuteness," the assemblage mumbled, glancing at each other, trying to figure out what he was getting at.
"Idle hands are..." the Chancellor continued.
"The peer reviewer's play things," they mumbled again, a few of the older ones starting to catch on.
"And what is the second rule of our order? Set down by the first wandering scholar, Herodus centuries ago?"
"Clean up your own damn shit!" the cry was muffled, as all but the Bother's eyes swiveled to Ciara, who tried to not melt under their accusing gaze.
"And I expect you all to follow that lesson, regardless of who travels with us. If anyone is caught shirking his duties he will be forced to work the shelves," the Chancellor said as if it were a death sentence, "Do I make myself transparently clear?"
The cowed heads nodded, their cowls slipping in front of their faces. "Good, now get back to work. We set out for the Northern Trade Route in the morning," he said once more, smiling inwardly as the hordes scattered back to their offices like deer that just caught sight of a wolf.
Ciara looked at the yellow speckled sock still clutched in her hand and dropped it to the ground. The Chancellor turned back to her, letting a grandfatherly smile take over and brightening his scarred face. "They'll continue to be pretarkin's in the backside, but if they give you any more of their chores simply ask that they ruminate upon what happened to Dean Lambor."
"Why? What happened to Dean Lambor?"
The smile grew wider, "I've never bothered to tell them. I prefer they think of their own damnation awaiting anyone who fails to scrub his own sock."
Ciara smiled for the first time in a week, having found a moments confidant in a sea of hateful red, "Thanks."
"It was nothing...Ciara." He fumbled his hand out and she grasped it, shaking it heavily the way her father always insisted, "You may call me Medwin."
Aldrin, for the first time since they raised anchor and set off down the road, pulled the book away from his face. Their rattling red convoy passed a few pilgrims heading to the Eastern shrine, and one wolf in a shepherd's clothing. Otherwise it was smooth sailing, the wind encouragingly keeping at their backs for most of the trip.
Historians were known to be mortal enemies of horses and would, when confronted with one, scream a feral literary roar then duck behind whatever provided protection. The horses, for the most part, had never been advised of the feud and generally trotted beside the crouching human and nosed through their pockets for sugar cubes.
Ages ago, a rather loopy artist took up with them rather than face an angry patron who now had a ceiling covered with the creation of man at the hands of Scepticar, then Argur, then the old god of Chaos, before settling upon a large cup of wine that claimed it was not so. All the client wanted was a fresh coat of white paint.
While watching the historians try to corral what was actually a young fawn and three badgers into their harness, he struck upon a brilliant plan, placing a set of sails upon the top of the caravans and anchoring them to the axel. Halfway through his design stage, he had another brilliant plan to hook a series of pedals to the axle instead. Being unable to chose, he added both so the caravans of the historians could both crest upon the winds and force some of their stronger lads to peddle until their hearts were about to explode. For these reasons, they highly prized the lone meteorologist in the group who spent most of his life calmly sipping tea while reading about famous clouds.
They blew within sighting distance of the next town, some little place where the academics could refuel and refood. One of his mentors had picked over the map that covered most of the wall of Caravan two, pricked with flags of varying colors, detailing their plan of attack, but Aldrin hadn't paid him much attention. He could worry about the towns he did and didn't rule after the crown was on his head.
His lessons had been going well, after they settled on starting with the Aravic alphabet and holding off on string theory until they could get their hands on some actual string. When they weren't drilling facts into his head, they slipped books into his hands. Simple things at first, little exercises in which a boy would stand or sit, what a girl spent her days doing (he was surprised there was very little mention of dagger waving based upon his recent experiences). His favorite, a book he hid under his bed sack when no one was looking, involved a small golden bird asking every animal it met if she were his mother. He'd read through that one five times already.
Once Chance called out "Town ho!" Chase tossed the anchor, in that Chase tied himself to the mast and jumped out onto the road, trying to hold the caravan in place. While the boy was wearing himself out so he'd sleep well that night, Kaltar vanished down into the bottom of the ship and slipped on the breaks, slowing the turn of the back axle until stationary ground was reached.
Every man emerged like a set of land sick travelers, pushing and shoving the caravans into a new clearing far enough away from the main road you'd have to be really paying attention to overhear secretive debates about the nature of the fork's creation. It wasn't until Chancellor Medwin paced once around the circle and declared they were in good shape, that the hungry men were released upon the unsuspecting world.
Kaltar, Chance, Chase, and the associate professor whose name Aldrin never managed to catch,
Aldrin's head was stuck firmly in a book, an old record of technology salvaged from dwarven mines that didn't entirely collapse when they vanished underground before the Great War. Most offered little more than a description of the metal and stone shrapnel, but a few risked an attempt at what the machine was used for. 'This small nodule, we suspect when collapsed, would send a small squirt of liquid, purified from the rocks and highly flammable, northward. At the same time, the striking of jagged metal upon metal would cause a spark which, when combined with the liquid would produce a seemingly endless flame. Most likely used in mating rituals."
"Boy," Kaltar said in his booming eastern coastal voice, "put down your book. There's work to be done."
While his mind was lost to dwarven miracles and ages past, his feet walked him into the middle of his first Empire town. It was nearly two decades hence when a swath of Northeastern Arda, in a bid for more attention, decided that perhaps hitching back up with the Empire was a pretty good idea. Plus, their ambassadors had been so friendly and the Empire makes this amazing cookie with egg whites that dissolved on the tongue.
It wasn't long before thatched roofs got tiled with red clay, wooden walls became brick, and dotted all along the Serene River grew little homages to the Empire's Cold Seat. Alleyways twisted and wound through the backs of the twenty or so houses proudly claiming ownership to the most loyal citizens of the Empire. But as the brick alleys dilapidated to dirt roads, dark walks away from the center fountain, a few houses stubbornly remained thatched, a few garden boxes refused to house basil, and charming archways became stolen piles of bricks thrown through quaint windows when the owner wasn't home. Apparently the Empire Love wasn't as universal as the Emperor liked to claim.
Kaltar pointed to the small stage set in front of the moderately impressive fountain. Just like the capital, every day between noon to the setting of the sun, the entertainment was encouraged to stand and rile the crowd with loving feelings for the ones who made it all possible. This was also the best time to get as much coin and grain as possible from a stable of bored farmers and pilgrims who'd never seen men in red robes before.
Chance and Chase dashed up to the stage, bowing and clapping, trying to get the handful of fruit peddlers and sausage grinders in on the audience. A few of the passing pilgrims wandered over, their hair dangling with knotted bread as they trekked to the great shrine ovens of the fire god, oddly placed nowhere near a volcano. Even gods like to take vacations. Red robes were a rare sight outside of the Emperor's guard and you only recognized them by the sword sticking out of your chest.
Chase clapped his hands once or twice, bouncing up and down on his heels while his brother coughed dramatically into his fist and began to unravel a scroll from his pocket. "It was the year of the unraveling goat, and the people of the microscopic village of Hammerfeld faced one of the worst grasshopper invasions any could remember for almost a decade."
"Why?"
The heckle threw Chance off his place, his finger slipping down to the really fascinating bits about how the farmers spent most of the mild winter dining upon roasted grasshopper and, it was theorized, that the grasshopper pie was born. Though due to a waning source material, mint was substituted later. He shook off his shoulders and tried to begin again, "the village of Hammerfeld was facing one of the..."
"What's so scary about a grasshopper?" the heckler was a purveyor of "okay" nets he wove together from finer nets. He spent most of his life wandering the brick alleys of this landlocked town critiquing anyone who dared entertain him, and occasionally sold a net.
Chase reached into his back pocket and extracted his slingshot, but there weren't any stones on that little creaking stage. Instead, he swiped from his brother's pocket one of the old toffees of Pajamas that Chance always kept in case of emergencies. He lined up the shot at the net salesman draped in his finest like a crazy mermaid abandoned at the altar by her fisherman husband.
"Grasshoppers make that crunch sound when you step on them," one of the Pilgrims said, a woman on the kinder side of fifty who didn't like to watch anyone fight.
"So's all the people of Screwdriverfeld needed was a really big shoe," the heckler laughed uproariously at his own joke, the first sign of a diseased mind. But the seeds of discord had already been planted and fertilized with fresh bullshit. The narrow audience began to whisper amongst themselves; mostly preferred pest control methods and how stories were much better back in the day.
