by Daryl Banner
“I am no K—” Forge starts.
But someone else cuts in, a short woman near Benton in full armor. “Even when I was guard here, deep in the mines, I knew there was something with you, King Forgemon. A spirit. You didn’t belong here, you never did. I believe in you, too.”
Another throws in her endorsement, and then two men cheer on the others, and then Forge finds himself standing before a crowd of his most enthused supporters the Undercity can possibly produce. It is exactly what the math promised him. Their loyalty is about to be profoundly tested, he also knows with mounting dread.
From the back of the crowd comes a softly-voiced question: “Is this about Geoff?”
Many heads turn, and some bodies shift, the cheering dying out. It’s from a young man, maybe eighteen or nineteen, who had been gathered by Wyass’s efforts.
Before Forge can answer, however, there is a scream that rips through the Great Hall and echoes down toward their junction. All heads turn the other way now, and it’s then that Forge feels the ice-cold stab of fate in his chest. The time is now.
“Arm up, each and every one of you, now!” calls out Forge, then swipes a pistol and sword for himself out of a nearby crate, clipping them to his belt, and hurrying off toward the shouting.
The Great Hall is filled with others who seem to be in pursuit of the noise as well. Forge calls out for everyone to stand back, to stay away, and to keep to themselves. It isn’t lost on Forge the shocked expressions as he passes by with his apparent army of enforcers, all equipped with pistols out and ready, swords clanging against their armored hips as they keep up, following Forge into the fray.
Forge stops at the other end of the Great Hall where two large corridors lead down to the housing units and Catacombs. It’s there, standing at the tall, expansive corridor that they find Geoff.
He carries in his arms what appears to be just a bundle of wool.
If it weren’t for the two feet hanging from one end of it.
“WHAT HAPPENED?!” screams Geoff, tears in his eyes, his beard trembling as his opened mouth shakes with despair. “WHAT DID YOU DO??! WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY SON??!”
“Calm now, Geoff.” Forge pockets his pistol at once and raises his hands. “Calm, calm.”
“YOU KILLED MY SON!! YOU FUCKING KILLED HIM!!” The man keeps alternating between screaming at Forge, then tightly squeezing the body of his son to his chest, pressing kisses to the boy’s forehead, whose feet hang limply from the bundle of wool.
The Great Hall is silent at once, deadly silent.
Forge keeps his distance, but even his small, choked voice is enough to fill the room. “I don’t know who killed your son, Geoff.”
“YOU DID!!” he screams, then drops to his knees with his son, caressing him and holding him close, his boy’s body on the floor.
“I will get to the—” Forge swallows, his mouth dry. “—to the bottom of this, Geoff. I swear to you. I will find out who did it. There were only a select number who had access. I will find out—”
The next instant, Geoff ditches his son and storms at Forgemon with a knife brandished, screaming with rage.
One loud pop of a pistol from behind Forge, and Geoff drops to the ground, his left leg buckling inward.
Forge blinks, flinching belatedly at the sound of the pistol.
Pandemonium breaks out at once. Three guards rush out from behind him and apprehend the still-screaming Geoff. Forge barely hears the man’s screams, the pop of the gun having deafened him. It is as if through balls of cotton that he hears the promises of revenge from the grieving father as he’s dragged away by the guards, a streak of blood drawing a line over the concrete floor of the Great Hall.
It’s much like the moment Forge’s own leg was shot when he and Aphne once devised a plan to escape, and Forge was caught by a guard in a long white hall—a guard with a pistol.
Am I that guard now? Is Geoff me? What am I doing?
“Forge,” comes a voice through the confusion and the madness and the pandemonium in the room. “Forge. King. King!”
“I am no King,” mumbles Forge, his eyes lost, still staring after where Geoff had been taken, out of sight. The boy still lies there in a roll of woolen fabric, one little trickle of his father’s blood drawn over it like the mark of an innocent red pen, a signature of a tyrant.
“Forge. What do we do? People are shouting. People are calling out for justice and shouting and—”
“Secure them.” Forge’s order comes from somewhere else, a part of his mind far away, detached from humanity and emotion and anything that feels. He is pure math. “Secure them all.”
As he stands there perfectly still, his eyes stuck on the lifeless body of that boy, three more pops of a gun are heard far, far away. There is more shouting, far, far away. Commotion that Forge knows nothing of, the whole of it happening behind him, unseen, unknown. All he can do is stare down at that boy’s body and witness as some tiny, unseeable part of his soul withers to nothing inside him.
For the one who knows things, he sure knows nothing.
But of this, he is certain: When the math equals zero, he won’t know who he is anymore. When the math equals zero, the one called Forgemon Lesser will cease to exist.
0319 Halvesand
“Where are you going?” asks Cope, like he does every day after breakfast. “We don’t train as much together. Were you assigned a task? Did they pick you for the Queen’s Shadow Guard? Why aren’t you telling me anything?”
Halvesand might laugh at the poor boy if he could. He just gives Cope a pat on his shoulder and a gesture at his own mouth, then shifts his tray over to him, his remaining fruit (Cope’s favorite) still sitting on it.
Cope frowns at the fruit. “I don’t want your leftover fruit. I want my friend back.” He eyes Halvesand with sudden pleading. “Can you meet me at the Grounds two hours past noon at least? Can you do that for me at the very least?”
But Cope is given no answer, and to the other end of Fortress Halves goes. He has been given access through a guarded corridor that leads down a winding hallway with barely three torches lighting its entire length. The hall, despite the heat of the flames, is eerily cold, and when he passes each torch, he hardly feels its warmth.
But that isn’t the strangest thing yet. The hallway seems to lead to a lower section of Ruena’s Shadow Tower, three floors beneath the Queen’s White Hall. When Halves stops at the stairs that lead up to her room, he always is faced with a stone archway to his left that leads into somewhere very dark indeed, not a hint of light giving its secrets away.
Each passing day, Halvesand’s curiosity grows.
And each passing day, Halvesand ignores the archway and goes up the tall, tall staircase to Ruena’s door, where he stands guard.
“Well, you’ve come again,” mutters Ruena one day as she opens her door, observes him for a moment, then adds, “Aren’t you bored? Aren’t you hungry? Thirsty? Where do you go when your bladder’s full? I don’t need a Bodyguardian.” And then her door softly closes.
Another day passes where he hesitates, staring into that great dark archway beneath the White Hall.
And another day passes where he goes up the stairs to Ruena’s room, ignoring the curious archway.
“Hasn’t my aunt given you something else to do?” asks Ruena on yet another day when the high-noon skies are grey, and the scent of rain hangs even in the air of the tower itself. “I’m sorry, but I am quite busy with my work. You are wasting your time standing there. Go back to your Grounds, please.”
Halves feels brave and makes a few gestures toward her: Is your work to do with the metal in there? Are you building something?
To that, Ruena appears confused, perhaps not being as quick with her hand language as he thought, or else she is offended that he asked her a question about her private work. Either way, he is left without an answer, and into her room she goes.
Halves straightens his back and stands at attention.
Another mor
ning, another glance at that dark archway.
Another morning, another choice to go up those stairs.
“I have told the guard downstairs to bring you lunch,” Ruena gently tells him one afternoon, “as I have noticed that you don’t even leave to join your fellow Guardian for middle-day meals. It’s a foolish thing to do, and I think you ought to feed yourself.”
Halves taps his chin with the fingers of one hand: Thank you.
Ruena makes no response, only slipping back into her room, the door shutting softly.
The next morning, Halvesand can’t say whether it is simply the daily grind of doing next-to-nothing standing outside Ruena’s door, or if it is his mounting curiosity with the inner workings of Fortress. But on this particular morning, he finds himself hesitating far longer than he usually does at the foot of those tower stairs. His eyes search longingly into the dark beyond that mysterious archway.
There’s something else at work here in Fortress, Halves knows. It’s something dark. Something big. Something important.
Without even meaning to, he finds himself walking toward the dark archway. It seems to open into the corner of a very, very large underground chamber. A cold and daunting silence fills it, much like the cold hallway leading to the foot of the Shadow Tower steps with the torches that he feels no warmth from. At the opposite corner of this great, cold room, there is one single light from a brazier, much like the brazier in the White Hall. With that source of light, Halves can see stone columns spaced throughout the room, support for the great structures of Fortress above them, no doubt. Perhaps there are even streets and buildings of the Abandon above here.
Perhaps driven by temporary insanity, Halves finds himself moving deeper into the room. He passes one column after another, his eyes adjusting to the near complete absence of light. Each of his steps is careful, for even the floor is difficult to see, and who’s to say there might not be a deadly pit somewhere in the room? In the cold, silent darkness of this underground chamber, Halves can only guess what he is to face.
What he finds at the other end of the room, however, confounds him worse. Next to the burning brazier, there is a circular door. It is, in fact, a perfect circle, with but an inch or two of lip at its bottom and its top, stretching the height of the wall. It is made of a thick metal, large buttons of metal lining the perimeter of the big circle. In its center there seems to be a handle of some sort, a big circular metal pipe that looks like the water valve to some great machine. He doesn’t dare touch it, finding himself at once intimidated by this contraption. Is it even a door? Halvesand Lesser does not know.
But that’s all he dares to discover, for his courage has depleted.
When he stands his post outside Ruena’s room that day, all he can think about is the vast and daunting room, and that strange circular door in its opposite corner by the brazier. He obsesses over it. They are always so close to the Wall. Where could it possibly lead? Is there yet another chamber within the Wall other than this Shadow Tower? Is it a vault of Queen Kael’s Lifted treasure, hidden away from slum eyes?
What secrets is the Dark Abandon keeping?
What secrets are Queen Kael and Ruena keeping?
Then, in the middle of his storm of thoughts and theories of the circular door, he hears the soft click of Ruena’s door opening, and then silence.
He turns.
Ruena stands there in the doorway, studying Halvesand with a pensive look about her face.
For an irrational moment, he worries that she knows. She must have caught him somehow, snooping in the dark where he doesn’t belong. Or she was told by another guard, who caught him. Or—
“Well, you serve no purpose standing out here all alone,” she says suddenly. “Come in. I’ve a task for you.”
Halves regards her only for a moment with surprise. Then, as quick as that, he lets drop all his fear and confidently strolls into her room, awaiting his task.
She brings him by the window where the spread of metal parts, shapes, plates, and pieces rest. Except now Halves recognizes a more obvious shape. There is a leg, an arm, and what appears to be a helmet of sorts—or else a very elaborate metal bowl out of which one might eat a curiously iron-tainted soup.
“This piece,” she says, giving a tap to the helmet, “must be attached to the end of this piece,” she says, indicating the top of a long pole with wires braided up its length, “and it’s too heavy for me. I …” She gestures at him. “… need your assistance.”
Halves isn’t certain handiwork is technically part of his duties as her Bodyguardian—which she still keeps insisting he is not—but he is bored out of his mind and ready to oblige her in any task she has. He squats down and, with a grunt, lifts the heavy thing and brings it up to the top of the pole.
“Right into there,” Ruena directs him, nodding. “Yes, into the small conduit. Yes, right there.”
The heavy thing slips into place, and the big metal contraption settles with one abrupt, tinny groan.
Ruena studies it awhile, her arms crossed. “This is taking a lot longer than I expected,” she admits to no one in particular. “Just a bit longer for the spine, and I think … I think … hmm, yes.” She starts to undo the braided wires, biting her lip as she works.
After a second, she stops and looks at Halves. “You may go.”
He stares at her. Really?
There is no sense arguing with the woman. He gives her a short bow from his waist, then makes his way across the room.
He doesn’t reach the door before she says, “You, no doubt, were one of the ones taken by our elaborate lie to the Last City of Atlas.”
Halvesand stops somewhere near her bed and turns his whole body, lifting an eyebrow her way.
Ruena doesn’t look at him as she speaks, giving her attention to the braided wires and the “spine” of her creation. “My … alleged suicide … was an elaborately woven lie to protect my identity. But it had another reason.” This next part is harder for her to say. “It was necessary … to stop the deaths from the Lifted City. To stop their … horrible sacrificing of … of one life every day that I was not returned to them. Their threat was real.” She closes her eyes for a moment. “So many deaths. So many … So many innocent lives. Wasted.”
When she opens her eyes, she says nothing more, continuing to work. Halves watches for a bit, curious. He finds he isn’t very much surprised by her news. He had suspected as much, anyway. There were witnesses to her actual suicide, witnesses which the Upstairs back at Eleven Wings deemed genuine. Ruena Netheris was, by all accounts, determined dead.
Now with the explanation that it was a (clearly well-believed) lie, at least he has one of his dozens of questions answered.
Ruena steps back to view her work, gives it an appraising nod, then picks up a small metal box from the floor and moves to her bed with it. She sits down on the edge and starts to mess within the box, wires and tiny copper cords sticking out of it like hair.
“You look rather uncomfortable,” murmurs Ruena, her nose lost in the box as she speaks. “Don’t you stand enough of your day? Sit.”
Halvesand, not feeling it appropriate to sit on the bed of his Sworn Duty—a woman who happens to be the Former To-Be-Queen Ruena Almont-Sunsong Netheris—moves to the desk by the wall and draws out its chair, taking a seat upon it. There is nearly a ten-pace stretch of distance between them.
Ruena is aware of that. “Are you afraid of me, Halvesand?”
By instinct, he lifts an opened hand and closes it at once into a pinched fist, as if catching a butterfly: No fear.
Ruena frowns. “No? Is that what that means? It is different than the ‘no’ you’ve used before. I’m not familiar with it.”
He lifts a fist and gives it a shake: Yes.
“See, that means yes, I know that one. The gesture nearly looks like a nodding head. But the other …?” Ruena tries it, pinching her fingers in the air. “So curious, the language of the mute and the deaf. I studied it once. I find it ever so cur
ious, languages. Do you know they speak three different languages in the second and third wards?”
He closes a fist in the air: No.
Ruena studies him for a moment. “You don’t ever smile.”
He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he merely stares at her, his eyebrows pinched together, his face stern, strong, and untelling as it ever is.
She crosses her legs. “I read a lot. And I had many tutors in the Lifted City, as you might expect a To-Be-Queen to have. I lost my parents at a very young age. Aunt Kael raised me.” Something sparks threateningly in the metal box she works on, and the woman doesn’t so much as flinch. “There is only so much to do when you aren’t allowed to leave this Shadow Tower. Well, I am allowed, but my options of where to visit are quite limited. Certain areas of Fortress, areas where I am not well-seen. I often get away with a lap or two around the above-walkway of the Grounds, but …” Her eyes flick over to him, hovering uncertainly at his chest. “I’m … certain some see me from time to time. I’ve seen you, for instance. And you, me.”
Halvesand finds his gaze lost on the sheets of her bed. He heard that Lifted folk all have beds in their rooms. He wonders why, other than for the purpose of a comfortable place to perch. And … sex. The Lifted are so dependent on their pleasures and comforts.
But Ruena, she doesn’t seem like the Lifted Ladies he has had the displeasure of handling. Ruena is strangely personable, as if he’s known her for many months already. While she is clearly a woman of many luxuries, she could very well be slumborn, perhaps a sixth warder, a Hightower, but one of the less snobbish ones.
Ruena has an unusual beauty about her, as it isn’t conventional. Her face is fair and petite, disturbed only by the scar that comes from the side of her head and across part of her jaw and cheek. Her body is shapely and young and slender, her breasts in that gown stealing a bit of Halvesand’s attention, but not enough to keep his actions from being decent. Her eyes have a softness about them, softer than he’d expect for a woman who almost sat the throne of Atlas, if it weren’t for a Mad Marshall ruining the day with blood and horror and chaos.
