by Daryl Banner
“He has,” agrees Link, staring blank-eyed through the glass.
Plastered to the wall in a thick coat of ice is the frozen corpse of Doctor Terrabeth Wise, her face trapped in one final expression of terror she made just before Kendil took her life, the ice even coursing into her mouth and likely down her throat, like a long, cold hand reaching inside to take hold of her heart.
0316 Forgemon
Forge finds her at the foodstores counting and jotting numbers down on a clipboard. There are many rooms that hold the food, but this one in particular is smallest and most narrow, like a hallway.
He comes to a stop at the door, leans against the stone framing, and crosses his arms. “So is this the way of it?” he asks her quietly. “Are we no longer friends?”
Aphne huffs. “Suck my dick,” she spits back, then moves on to another shelf, counting cans of beans.
Forge steps into the room some more, stopping by the crates of bottled water. “I told you I had to do it. I had to put his boy in a cell to teach him a lesson. The maths show it’s necessary. This Geoff …”
“Oh, enough about Geoff. You talk about him like a jealous ex-boyfriend. Maybe it’s his dick you want to suck. Put you two in the same room, you already look like long-lost lovers. Matching beards, even.” The end of her pencil snaps. “Fuck.”
Forge hands her a splinter of wood from off a nearby crate. She gives it one scornful glance, then snatches it from his pinched fingers and closes her eyes, concentrating. Slowly, the end of her broken pencil turns as sharp as the splinter.
Then she flicks the splinter back at him. “Don’t expect me to thank you,” she mumbles before returning to her work.
“Your Legacy is a marvel.”
“Sure, well, tell that to the food I can’t copy. If only I could adapt pebbles of rock into nuts and beans and barley, we’d be able to live down here forever.” She moves on down the row, counting more.
Forge takes a few steps, following her. “Listen, Aphne …”
“They’re already calling you a tyrant, you know.” She scratches down a few more numbers. “Ello and his friends in the electrics, they hate you. They think as well as I do that you’re lying about futures.”
“You truly think I’m lying?”
“I don’t think you always tell the truth.” Aphne eyes him. “And whether that can be considered lying or not, I’ll let you decide.” She carries on. “I warned you. Rule hard and rule strong, sure, we’ve said that since the start, but you can’t rule with blind rage and passion.”
“This is not blind rage nor passion.”
“People trust a fist and they trust the stone. They don’t trust a scowl and a bad feeling. You’ve got everyone questioning you now.”
“So be my co-ruler then,” Forge says, his temper letting go ever slightly, “and stop questioning me and start helping me. What do you think I ought to have done, Aphne? The boy stole. Everyone saw it. Geoff has half the Undercity wrapped about his finger. What do you see that I am not seeing? And why are you not seeing what I see? If I let the boy go unpunished, I am announcing to everyone that Geoff and his children can run over all of us and do as they wish. That, my dear assistant, is neither ruling strong nor hard.”
“So it wasn’t about the maths and ‘certain doom to us all’?” she fires back. “It was just Forge making a Forge decision?”
“It … wait, yes, it was the maths,” he stammers. “I said it was.”
Aphne closes her eyes, then slaps down her clipboard. “I like you, Forge. I have liked you since that first stupid moment I saw you acting like you could get in with the dumbest and make a friend or two. I don’t know why, but I did. Did I question why I liked you? No. I trusted you, and I felt good about you. I just fucking went with it … and now look at me. I’m second-in-command.”
“Co-ruler.”
“Second-in-command.” She comes right up to his face, her nose nearly in his beard. “So why are you questioning this Exomentalist idiot Geoff just because he—”
The unfamiliar word hits Forge hard. “Exomentalist …?”
Aphne rolls her eyes. “It’s a … some dumb word I … that I made up. Why accuse him of having—of having a Legacy who—I mean a Legacy that makes him …” She seems to have gotten flustered, blood rushing to fill up her cheeks as she shakes her head and gathers her thoughts. “I mean, why question Geoff’s Legacy just because people find him easy to trust and like? I found you just the same. Perhaps manipulating others’ emotions isn’t his power.” She gives Forge a snort. “Perhaps it’s yours.” Then she flips what bit of hair she has and turns back to her counting work, scratching away on her clipboard.
Forge stands there staring at the side of her stern, focused, and aggravated face. He isn’t sure what it is, but something is turning over very quickly in his mind, something certain, something that is—this time—not a deception.
And it’s all to do with that one strange word. “Exo … mentalist,” he hears himself repeating, trying the word once more on his tongue.
Aphne, yet again, rolls her eyes in the exact same manner she did before, stiff and uncomfortable, but this time makes no response.
It isn’t what she said. It’s how she said it.
And how she’s reacting right now.
It’s a bit of math that Forge cannot, in any way, fit into the great machine of his work down here in the Undercity. Yet still, as the figures work over and over in his exhausted brain, he cannot let go the tiny notion that there is something very wrong here.
Something out of place.
And for the first time, it has to do with Aphne directly.
But I trust her, he reminds himself. I’ve trusted her since the first day, have I not? Or is that the very problem, that I’ve allowed my trust in her to blind me from pushing my math her way?
What if there is something important—something big—that he has not allowed himself to see? Would his Legacy actually be that cruel and self-sabotaging as to overlook it?
When he leaves the foodstores, a deeply unsettling storm has taken flight in his stomach. He can’t bring himself to the Great Hall to enjoy a meal, even if he is hours overdue for one. Something is eating at him inside, something awful. Exomentalist …
Can he trust Aphne?
Can I trust myself …?
He finds himself at the main junction, a cavern-like intersection with a wide stony mouth opening to the Great Hall one way, and three mines entrances the other, as well as the deep tunnel that leads down to the electricity and the forges. It’s here, right in the center of every path of travel, that the tormenting maths click into place.
I need a plan, he realizes at once.
And it cannot include Aphne.
He chooses a path and starts down it, his feet stamping so hard, his ankles and knees are sore by the time he reaches his destination. “Wyass,” he greets him curtly after rounding the corner and nearly colliding into the man.
Wyass was busy sifting and prospecting through a mine cart of crushed stone for gems and metals when Forge appeared. His tawny hair is greyed with dust and soot, even his beard speckled and nearly white with ash. “Y-Yes, King Forge?”
“Stop it with the King nonsense. I need your assistance, as well as your three most—” The math snaps and shifts. “—your seven most loyal friends.”
Wyass frowns. “I’m not sure I have seven loyal friends, sir.”
“You do. The math never lies. Find them now and report to me in the junction. You have an hour.” Forge departs right then, leaving Wyass to sputter unintelligibly for a second before he hurries away, ditching his mine cart and his duties.
In the armory, Forge confronts Gaelia, who looks up from her desk where she was focused on uniting the chestplate to a backplate of a set of redstone mail. “King,” she grunts, pushing up her goggles.
“None of that King crap,” Forge mutters back, then leans over her desk and lowers his voice. “I need you to amass your seventeen finest, Gaelia. All
of you, I need fully armed in redstone. Weapons, too, with ranged options. Meet me at the junction in fifty minutes.”
“Is this a mission into the tunnels?” A light turns on in Gaelia’s eyes, framed by her mess of curly hair pressed down to her forehead by the goggles. “Are you taking a team into the tunnels?”
“Junction. Fifty minutes. You and your seventeen finest, Gaelia.” Then off Forge goes, leaving Gaelia staring after him, stunned.
As Forge cuts through the Great Hall, he keeps his eyes locked ahead of him, his face plain, and his movements inconspicuous. No attention, no alerting, no sign of distress. He predicts three people will greet him along the way, and to each of those three people, Forge gives them an unremarkable nod, like it’s any other day, like it’s any other time. No, I’m not recruiting. Why would you think that? Look the other way, keep talking about the pussy you had, keep ignoring me.
The whole way he goes, he tongues a little space in his mouth that used to hold a tooth—until it was punched out of his face during a quarrel with three silhouetted prison guards in the mines long ago.
All led by a certain hateful guard who called Forgemon Lesser a “Sanctum boy fucker” and hated him from the start.
A guard I am paying an important visit to right now.
He finds him in the kitchens. The two have had nothing to do with one another since the unleashing of the Madness. For a while, Forge had assumed the man, like many of the guards of the Keep, took off for his family on the surface. The man had a lover—an unfaithful lover—as well as a daughter who wasn’t his own, and a daughter who was, but whom he tragically lost. Perhaps it was the unfaithfulness that inspired the man not to go. Since the King of Bones, Ames, left and blew up the only exit, the man’s been stuck down here, robbed of choice, and has had to assimilate.
His name is Benton Borderis.
When Forge enters the kitchens, whatever casual chatter was going on dies, and a lot of faces meet his. Some are curious. Some are suspicious. Some narrow their eyes quizzically through the steam of pots and greased stovetops.
“Benton,” calls Forge.
The man emerges from the crowd. The power dynamic between them has shifted dramatically, which is evident in the way Benton folds his arms and observes Forge with just a patient, tight-jawed scowl and heavy-lidded eyes instead of an air of superiority and hate. He neither respects Forge, nor despises him any longer.
I am counting on that ambivalence. “Benton, a word.”
The man, whose clean-cut face and sharply parted hair makes him a stark contrast to a number of dirtier, rattier folk in the Keep, gives Forge five solid seconds of uninterested staring before he then excuses himself out of the kitchens and into a small closet space for said word. Forge gives the others in the kitchens a nod to carry on with the lunch service, then follows Benton to the closet.
When the two are face to face, Forge keeps his voice as even and low as he can. “I am in need of your counsel.”
Benton’s eyebrows pull together. “Of mine? Why of mine?”
“You are, of those in the kitchens, the only one I can trust.”
Those are some challenging words for the man to process. “You must think I’m a damn fool to believe a thing like that.”
“I’ve proved it once, haven’t I? I know things.” Forge’s eyes turn hard. “It was not with pleasure that I told you of your lover and her slum-bound interests in the third long ago. You believed in the lie of my sentencing and had a mark on my back since the start. Aye,” he then grunts, anticipating Benton’s protest, “I do remember your gift to me, cruelly upgrading my red-twelve into a red-twenty. Sanctum boy fucker, you liked to call me. I remember it all vividly.”
“For all I know, that’s exactly what you are,” says the man with a flippant attitude, “and you have the whole Keep fooled.”
“I pray your family is good with the Broadmores like you said.” Forge gets really close to the man. “Because my son was in love with the one called Athan. And it was both their lives I protected in my false confession. It was in protecting both their lives that I ended up here in front of your ugly fucking face.”
Benton looks affected by that information, though it is difficult to say whether he’s moved or mad. He keeps silent either way.
Forge does not. “And it is my intention someday to see my son again, and to see his happy face alongside that Athan Broadmore, no matter what it takes. I will do anything for my son.”
After a brief stare-off, the man slowly begins to nod his head. “I once had a girl of my own, a girl I’d move worlds for. She’s dead.”
“I remember that, too.”
The men then seem to ease off one another, all the tension between them changing from something deadly to something more focused, like the nocking of an arrow, pulled back, ready.
“Benton, I’ve a favor to ask, and it is not an easy favor. It may … no, it will require a great deal of risk, and a great deal of … discretion.”
“What is this about?” Benton squints suspiciously at him, as if trying to squeeze the whole story from Forgemon’s face. “How could you possibly come to me for a favor, the man who made your time here full of inhumane suffering and cruelty? How could I possibly trust that, now with all the Keep behind you, you aren’t planning your revenge on me at long last?”
It’s now that Forge’s voice lowers to nearly nothing. “Look into my eyes, Benton. Don’t listen to my words. Just my eyes. Look right into them as hard as you can, as deeply as you can.” Forge doesn’t blink, their gazes locked on one another’s as certainly as steel bolts. “You see it now, don’t you? I am beyond needs of loyalty. I have no hunger for settling scores. I am a father, a husband, and a brother, and I will survive this until the end, do you understand me? And to do that, I require your help. Look into my eyes and tell me I lie.”
Benton swallows hard, his eyes falter, and then he says, “So what is it you need of me?”
To that, Forge says: “I need you and all the former guards of the Keep to meet me at the junction in forty minutes. There should be sixty-six others, plus you, totaling sixty-seven. You must tell no one of this task I’m giving you. Tell no one of your orders.”
“What is this?” He sounds for the first time worried. “Are we in trouble? Is something happening?”
It’s already happening. “It’s imperative that all sixty-seven of you are found and met in the junction. I need you geared, with a supply of pistols and swords in crates enough for ninety-three souls. Not a single one of you can be missing. Can I count on you, Benton?”
“I will be there in forty minutes,” Benton confirms.
Next, Forge makes his way to secure the final piece of his plan, a piece down in the vast Catacombs where a certain food-snatching boy named Aceyn must be freed from his cell. He learned his lesson, and for this plan to work, he must be released to pacify his father Geoff.
When Forge unlocks and pulls open the door to Aceyn’s cell, he finds a boy on the ground, his mouth stuffed with mashed food.
He choked. Forge rushes to the boy in a panic. He’s not breathing. Forge thrusts fingers into Aceyn’s mouth, scooping out white, lumpy mash in a panic. He beats on the child’s chest, slaps his cheeks, and goes digging his finger down the boy’s throat some more, desperate. His forehead covered in sweat, Forge lifts him up, hugs him from behind, and thrusts his fists into the boy’s belly. More clumps of mashed white goo fall down his front, dislodged by the force.
But when Forge lets go, Aceyn only drops lifelessly to the floor, no breath left in his little, silent body.
No, no, no, no, no, no …
Forge presses his mouth to the boy’s, giving countless lungfuls of air. After twenty exhausting minutes, he realizes his efforts are in vain, and the boy’s life is lost. It’s been lost for hours.
0317 Arrow
There is something wrong about the day.
The wind is picking up. It’s cold, yet warm. Something is wrong.
Arrow no
tices it even more after climbing onto his perch on the roof of the Lesser house, peering into the sky. The arm of the Lifted City that is closest seems darker than usual. Or is it the sky beyond the arm that is darker? Is the rain coming for them?
The rain has always been coming for me.
As he squats there upon the roof, right where he and sometimes Athan come to get away from the noise, he is reminded of the oddly-shaped added weight of the gun tucked in the back of his jeans.
He couldn’t keep it sitting in the drawer of his desk anymore, not after Prat found the thing. He can’t risk another slip. He needs to be careful, especially when near a wild cannon as Prat. Paranoid that he might snoop even more, Arrow snatched a few old charms out of his desk, one of which he’s fiddling with in his hand, brooding.
A human being can only take so much pressure before they—
“Are we avoiding one another?”
Arrow turns. Ivy’s head is poking out of the hatch. Her hair becomes one with the wind at once, blowing all around her face. He watches her awhile, taken with her beauty. He feels as if that night was a fleeting one, a night that will never again repeat, a night of pure circumstance forcing them together. Were he just a boy calling upon her in the sixth, she never would have looked his way.
“No,” answers Arrow finally.
“Good.” Ivy pulls herself through the hatch and takes a seat by him on the roof, then hugs her knees to her chest.
The pair of them stare down at the goings-on of the streets. From up here, even the street behind their house is visible, and all the backyards, some overgrown, some trimmed and neat, some with a tree or two and many without. The Lesser house isn’t quite tall enough to look any farther, but Arrow catches himself wondering how much longer they have of the Greens before their main source of food, water, and herb is gone.
Can they truly count on this Slum King to come and help them? Will Athan’s mission prove a complete and total waste of time?
Is the age of diplomacy and cooperation dead?
