by Eric Guindon
“Thank you, Papa,” Kyria said, before letting him go.
“Don’t thank me yet. You might regret having asked to see this, Kyria.”
She didn’t think that she would, but nodded anyway.
She could not recognize the place.
When she looked far enough away from the actual spot, she could see familiar shapes, but when she looked at where the passage had been, the area was completely changed.
“Where’s the way I used to get in?” She asked her father, looking more closely, circling the area.
“We never knew how you got in there,” he answered. “We had to shift and move a ton of this stuff to get you out.”
“But there was a passage here,” she pointed uncertainly.
“The metal was moving, bending itself when we first arrived. I figure you activated a rune.” Kyria’s father shook his head. “The noise of the metal shearing and tearing was what drew us to this spot. Your mother had hung back to check on you while we headed into the Yard to see what the matter was. When she found you missing, your mother almost ran into the Yard to tell us. She stopped at the gate and yelled her lungs out to make sure we knew. That’s when we began digging through this stuff.”
It was all so different from when she had seen it that night. She remembered touching the rune, she remembered it draining her. There had been noise above and around her, vibrations.
A voice had spoken to her, she thought. A voice had tried to warn her about the rune. Now, weeks later, she doubted her own memory of the incident. What could possibly have been talking to her, anyway?
She shook her head to clear it.
“Why did I trigger the rune? I thought the linen suits insulated a person from them?” she asked. Her father had been rather sparse in his explanations to her during her work in the Yard, telling her what to do and not to do, but almost never telling her why. She had tolerated this so far, but it was wearing on her. She wanted to know the whys.
“Sweat is what I think,” he said without explaining himself further. Her father was often unbearably laconic.
“But . . . why?!” Her exasperation was mounting. Her father smiled at her, a kind and apologetic smile.
“I’m sorry, sweetling. I’m not deliberately trying to frustrate you. I want you to understand and appreciate that a lot of what we do, we don’t know the why of it. Why linen, for instance? We don’t know. I do know that leather is no good. My grand-father, your great-grand-father, tried to replace the clumsy linen gloves for leather ones. It didn’t work at all. The runes activated when touched through leather. We don’t know why. The runes are a cursed subject; no one likes to talk about them. They were a mistake our ancestors paid for.” He paused. Kyria thought this was the most words she had ever heard him say in one conversation.
“Our family pays for it still, in a way, even if we make our living at it,” he continued. “Anyway. You wanted to know about your accident with the rune. Sweat can saturate your suit. When it’s wet, the linen doesn’t protect from contact with the runes. Why that is? I don’t know: you’d have to ask a rune-smith from the Time Before,” he shrugged and stopped talking. It took a few moments for Kyria to realize her father’s usual quiet nature had reasserted itself.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” she said. She meant it too. She had needed, deep down, to see the place where she had almost died. Perhaps, for another, it would have been a traumatic sight, but for Kyria, it brought a comforting sense of reality to that night.
“Do you mind if I look around a bit more?” She asked. Her father told her to go ahead.
Kyria went as close as she could to the deformed pieces of runic metal where her father had told her she had been found. It looked completely different from anything she remembered, but when she peered more closely, she thought she spotted the rune she had activated. It appeared so innocent, sitting there unlit and inactive, yet it had brought the metal passage she had been crawling in down on her and done who knew what else. She so dearly wished she understood the runes and how they worked. But such thoughts were wrong. Runes had been the bane of the Time Before, she had to remind herself.
No, they weren’t, she told herself . . . or did she?
The thought didn’t seem to be her own when she examined it. Was it the voice? Nothing further came to her. She stayed immobile, listening with her mind for so long that she jumped when her father put a hand on her shoulder.
“Are you all right, sweetling?” he asked her.
“Yeah,” she said, standing up and getting away from the distorted pile of runic metal.
“It’s hard to face that you almost died here, isn’t it?” her father asked.
“Yeah,” she murmured agreeably, but automatically; she was too busy worrying about losing her mind to care much about almost dying.
As the years passed, Kyria kept listening for the voice, but she did not hear it again. She eventually managed to make herself believe the dreams and the voices were delusions she had made up. She buckled down and soaked up all the Yard would teach her, becoming knowledgeable enough that she could take over running the place while her father made his occasional runs into the village for supplies and other sundries.
It was easy for her to lose herself in the routine of the work. When someone presented themselves at the Rune Yard, if they weren’t a regular, the first thing they asked for was clean metal. It was hard for her not to laugh at the looks on the faces of the customers when they were told the price for such a prize. Invariably, to Kyria’s experience, they would next ask what other options were open to them. Most would then choose between mixed metal, having a content of ten to fifty percent runic material, and contaminated metal, which had runes over more than fifty percent of its surface. Contaminated metal was cheaper, there was plenty of it, but it was also more dangerous to handle, for both the workers and the customer.
When the metal making up the desired weight was located and extracted from the Yard, Kyria and the workers wrapped each individual piece in sheets of linen. These were included in the price; it would be madness to sell mixed or contaminated materials without taking basic safety measures.
The customer then took away the metal and brought it to one of many smelters. The workers there threw the load into the smelters, linen and all, not risking any chance of touching the bare metal and therefore, the runes.
No one liked having to get metal from the Rune Yard, but it was cheaper and easier than mining for the stuff, so Kyria’s family managed to eke out a living from their trade, despite the bad reputation that came with it.
Since keeping the books was also part of the business, Kyria’s father taught her how to maintain them, adding the daily revenues and subtracting all expenses. As she went over the books, the girl was surprised at how much of the profits went to pay taxes.
“Father? Who do we pay taxes to?” Kyria thought the nearby village might require them to pay taxes, but the amount listed in the books looked ridiculous.
“Hmm?” Her father was distracted, sewing up a tear in one of the linen suits. “Taxes is taxes, sweetling.”
“This seems like most of our profit,” she pressed.
“That’s the amount of our taxes,” he told her. “We pay what we have to pay, Kyria. It cuts into our profit, but it keeps us safe.”
It cut into the profits a lot, she saw. The total outgoing under the entry labelled taxes was more than the sum of the entire payroll, the next highest expense.
She tried to pursue the matter further with her father but he gave more of the same, ignoring her under the pretence of working on the linen suits. She soon gave up. Her father could be an obstinate man when he wanted to be. She figured she’d know all about the taxes someday, there was no need to make a big deal of it right then. But it was a lot of money. The Yard could even be prosperous if it weren’t for the taxes.
This was still on her mind the next day when she led a team into the Yard to retrieve mixed metal for a customer.
The team
consisted of Kyria herself, Noram, who by then was their longest lasting retainer, and two relative newcomers named Hexel and Edden. As they walked, it being a hot day, Kyria allowed everyone to undo the headpieces of their linen suits. She hoped it would help them cool off, reducing the sweat saturating their suits.
As they neared their goal, everyone got busy putting on headpieces and getting ready for the work ahead. Concentrating on this, they failed to notice the approach of the feral dog.
The hungry, lean beast growled low at them; their first warning something was wrong. Kyria immediately stopped fiddling with her headpiece, dropping it to the ground to free her hands. She saw Noram had done the same.
Hexel asked, “What’s that?” and worked doubly fast to finish putting on the headpiece. Edden was frozen with panic.
Kyria slowly moved to draw her weapon. All the workers carried a long knife, almost a short sword, for dealing with problems like these. She intended to stab the thing if it moved toward them, but she was still drawing her knife when the dog jumped.
Probably threatened by his quick, panicked movements, the dog leaped at Hexel. It likely was aiming to tear out his throat but what its jaws closed on was one of his arms. Hexel screamed and, contrary to his training, flailed about, trying to shake the dog off.
Kyria saw the dog’s teeth had broken through Hexel’s suit and blood was welling up out of the wound. There lay the real danger, she knew.
Moving to end the threat quickly, Kyria carefully readied a precise strike. When the moment was right, she hit the back of Hexel’s head with the pommel of her knife. She had wanted to hit him just hard enough to daze, but she saw immediately that she had overdone it; his legs gave out under him and he collapsed to the ground in an awkward heap, the feral dog still latched onto his arm with a will.
With the threat of Hexel spreading his blood all over this area of the Yard dealt with, Kyria moved to stab the dog. Noram beat her to it, taking care to kill the poor beast.
Unfortunately, Kyria had only minimized the situation: Hexel’s blood had splashed on some of the nearby runes and they began to glow as she watched.
“Oh no!” This from Edden who had managed to recover from his previous terror, only to discover something new to terrify him.
As they watched, an immense metal construct, all one piece, launched into the air with surprising speed. It took Kyria a few moments to realize that the vitality contained in the blood would not last long and that the two-ton flying metal object was bound to come crashing back down any second.
“Run!” she yelled to the team. She struggled to drag Hexel along with her, away from the impact area. It was hard going for a second, the man was heavy, but she soon had Noram’s help and they managed to get themselves out of danger.
When it came down, the flying two-ton object deafened the crew with the noise of its impact, raising a cloud of dust to choke and blind them.
Kyria, Noram, and Edden were knocked flat on their backs. The girl saw that she had underestimated the dangerous area. The impact had come very close to flattening the lot of them.
Shaken, they picked themselves back up and dragged Hexel toward the Yard’s entrance. Kyria was unsurprised to see her father and some of the other workers meet them partway.
“We heard the noise,” her father said as he looked them over. “Is everyone all right?”
“Hexel was bit, his blood flew everywhere,” she told her father, her voice too loud; her ears were still ringing. “He needs help. The rest of us are okay.”
It turned out Hexel was not grievously wounded, for which Kyria was thankful. He had a concussion and would be off work for a few days, but he would otherwise be all right.
Noram found her watching over Hexel as he rested.
“You did the right thing,” he told her. “His flailing might have killed us all.”
“I know . . . I guess,” she nodded.
“Hexel should have known better than to flail around like that,” Noram shook his head. “Damn rookies!”
Kyria was surprised to find that she was a veteran, as far as Noram was concerned. He patted her on the back. “You did what needed to be done. Hexel will respect that or he’s even stupider than he looks,” he said as he left her alone with her thoughts.
Pride filled Kyria, pride and a certain happiness. She was working in the Yard and was doing it well. Her mother had even dropped the idea of sending her to her uncle in the city altogether.
She couldn’t have been happier with how things were turning out.
Chapter Four:
Tax Collectors
A group of riders was spotted approaching the Yard, almost two months after Kyria’s seventeenth birthday. They were a large group, all riding individual horses, and coming from the east, not the south — the direction of the nearest village. To Kyria’s eye they seemed to be riding hard.
They didn’t have the look of customers. Customers would have a cart, and were rarely in such a hurry.
Bandits? The girl wondered, finding herself excited by this possibility for a moment, before the harsh realities of a real bandit attack came to her mind.
She ran out of the house and yelled for everyone to hear: “Riders! Riders from the east!”
Some of the off-duty workers looked in that direction. Among them was Edden, now slightly more seasoned than the year before. He shielded his eyes from the sun and gazed a long while in the direction Kyria had named. He grimaced like he’d tasted something bitter.
“Riders,” he confirmed. “An unsavoury-looking bunch of fellows, if you ask me.” He spat on the ground.
Kyria’s father came out of the Yard and, after taking a look east, turned to her. “Get in the house and stay hidden,” he ordered. “Now!” He added when she did not immediately move to obey. The girl was surprised at her father’s tone; he had never been this stern with her before. She hurried inside.
Her bedroom, now on the second floor, had a window overlooking the yard in front of the stables. She went there, and hid herself behind the window’s curtain. She didn’t think she could be seen from below. This was confirmed for her when her father glanced up at the window once, looking searchingly, it seemed, for a sign of her. She held very still and he eventually gave up.
He used the Time Before the riders’ arrival to brief every one of his workers. He had brought them all to stand with him, ready to receive the riders, each worker armed with his long knife, sheathed at his side. None of them wore the linen suits, she saw. How Kyria wished she could hear what was being said.
Her mother came to join her in the bedroom.
“Trust you to find the best place to spy on the proceedings,” she said as she moved to stand beside her at the curtain.
“Do you know who those men are?” Kyria asked.
Her mother let out a sigh. “I guess there’s no sense in keeping it from you, no sense at all. They’re the tax collectors, sweetling.”
Kyria looked at her mother sharply. “The what? Those are not officials, Mother.”
Shaking her head, Kyria’s mother said, “And still, they are the people we pay taxes to. Paying them keeps us all safe, Kyria.”
The girl could not believe it. For the exorbitant fees these thugs were getting paid, they should be standing guard on the Yard day and night! Of course, there was no need for this: the tax collectors were the only threat the Yard needed protection from.
“That’s not right,” Kyria said it more to herself that to her mother, yet Santha nodded in agreement.
“It’s a hard world out there, sweetling. It’s not all like your storybooks, it’s not.”
By then the riders had arrived. Each man had his own horse and there were six of them. At that time, Kyria’s father had seven men in his employ. Still, even though they outnumbered the tax collectors, it was plain to Kyria who had the upper hand. The riders rode in a circle around her father and his workers for a few seconds, laughing at how this terrified them.
Each of the riders, K
yria saw, carried a sabre raised in his hand and had a crossbow strapped to his saddle. These were well-equipped tax collectors; they were far better equipped for a fight than her father and his men. When the circling riders came to a halt, they remained separated by a few metres each, surrounding the Yard’s men.
She saw that one of the riders commanded; he was the one who had ordered them to stop circling, the one her father addressed.
“I want to know what they say,” she told her mother, intending to move to a room on the first floor, where she thought she might be able to overhear their conversation.
“When they come like this, it’s always to raise our taxes,” Santha said. This stopped Kyria.
“But we can’t afford to give them any more. I’ve seen the books, Mother.”
“Hopefully they’ll accept that,” she said.
The girl left her mother and made her way down to the first floor. The room she had in mind had an open window, but no curtain to hide behind. She crawled to lie beneath the window. It took a few seconds before she could quiet her breathing enough to hear the conversation outside.
“But I see customers come and go from this place all the time, I do,” said a voice Kyria did not recognize. She decided he must be the leader. He had the same manner of speaking as her mother. Kyria’s father called it the Groandel-double. The girl guessed this man must have been raised in that city, like her mother. “What do you mean you can’t afford to pay more taxes?”
“I mean that we’re barely making ends meet as it is,” her father responded. The meekness of his tone was painful to hear. She had always seen her father as the one in charge, never as this servile man begging to keep what little remained of what was his. “I’ve already reduced my work team, more taxes would mean more cuts and then I couldn’t handle the work, which would mean even less money with which to pay you!”
