by Jason Letts
The local commander all the way up to the Guard’s chief captain, Keran, would be looking for answers about how a known militant and traitor to the nation had been allowed within fifty miles of the chancellor, much less able to have a conversation long enough to dramatically alter the political climate.
“Those gashole Brackens should be round up and shot,” whispered one guard in another bunk.
“He won’t get a single vote. It’ll all be a lark,” said another.
Taylor stewed in his bed. As far as everyone else in the Guard’s Toine contingent knew, he was Roark Cardan, which was the name Sander had created for him back at the command center. Although it was likely Sander had taken the fall to get him where he was, she must’ve died before spilling his secret, because no one had come looking for him in the weeks since sneaking aboard that transport and taking on a new identity and a new post in the capitol. All of that could unravel quickly if they discovered he’d helped Randall. Getting caught and paying the price for it was fine, but it couldn’t be before Taylor completed his part of the plan.
Suddenly the emergency alarms in the room started flashing and a harsh voice came over the loudspeakers.
“All members of Units Two through Five are required to meet in the assembly hall,” a female voice said as the lights came on. Taylor was in Unit Three, and everyone in his bunk began groaning and getting up. Those units were full of new recruits performing mundane duties like patrolling the streets or working the radio switchboard, and Taylor had little doubt this was an attempt to get everyone together to flush out the guilty party.
Taylor rolled out of bed and moved for the window, only to find one of the whisperers pulling it closed.
“No need to let it get too chilly in here while we’re gone,” he said.
Muscles tensed, Taylor raged inside at the fool concerned about the temperature. He’d blocked Taylor’s escape route, and fighting the man off with so many others around would only reveal his guilt. There was nothing left to do but join the crowd and progress to the assembly hall, which was essentially a hangar with bleachers and flags hanging down representing the Guard’s various sectors.
Each unit had about a dozen members, all of who settled into the bleachers in front of the regional commander and some of the other higher-ups. None of them looked like they’d gotten any sleep. Only a few members of each unit were in the rotation for switchboard duty, and the only thing that kept them from immediately apprehending Taylor was that he always signed in with the names of other guards.
The regional commander, a man of strong stature with deep eye sockets and sunken cheeks, stepped forward to address them.
“As many of you know, there were some startling events that took place at the end of the last cycle. The chancellor was extremely displeased to be interrupted during his duties, which I take full responsibility for, and as a result we now have the added responsibility of carrying out an election, especially in municipalities where the fighting has affected civil servants. As usual, you’ll be completely obedient to my orders in this regard.”
As Taylor listened, his lips parted and his eyes widened. It was entirely possible they’d be coming for him later, but for the moment the commander was doubtlessly much more concerned with covering his own ass than anything else. Was it possible the commander had thought it better to go along with the story that he’d sent Randall to the chancellor rather than reveal he had less than complete control over his men?
“The more pressing issue that I’ve called you here for is that we’ve lost one of the members of the chancellor’s personal guard in the aftermath of these events, and selecting another is our first order of business,” the commander continued. Now Taylor had no doubt that the commander was concerned for his personal safety if one of the personal guard had already lost his life over it.
“Let me remind you that being selected to the chancellor’s personal guard is both an honor and a great responsibility, not to mention a greater challenge than any you’ve ever had. As is tradition, the chancellor will select the new member of the personal guard himself.”
At that, a door opened up along the other side of the hangar, and Chancellor Aggart stalked through to the center of floor. Upon first seeing him, everyone on the bleachers immediately stood up, and some of them standing a few rows up were still only at Aggart’s eye level. The man seemed in a foul mood, and a reddish tint to his dark beard struck Taylor as residue of blood. He wondered how violently the chancellor had taken out his wrath on that member of his personal guard.
“Too tall. Too short. Too top heavy. Too redheaded. You, come down here,” he ordered one of the men to Taylor’s right. There were women in the assembled units, as well, but everyone knew he wasn’t likely to pick one of them. When the young man came down, Aggart stared at him.
“I’m going to try to hit you, and you’re going to block. Understood?”
The young man nodded. A moment later, Aggart delivered a punch like a jackhammer to the young man’s stomach. The cadet groaned and wilted onto the ground, curling into a ball. Aggart continued looking over the new recruits, finally picking out another one in the front row.
“You try to hit me, and I’ll defend,” he ordered with his hands behind his back. The young guard scanned his target, but when he reached back the chancellor head-butted him in the chest and knocked him flat on the floor. The guy rolled and attempted to suck in air. It was possible his lungs had collapsed. Taylor had to admit the chancellor had incredible strength.
“You,” the chancellor said, and Taylor realized it was he who was being called. His heart rate picked up, his breathing deepened, and the familiar impulse of the Ma Ha’dere’s energy surged within him as he stepped down to the floor and looked up at Cumeria’s rugged leader.
The chancellor peered into Taylor’s eyes and twisted his neck ever so slightly. The surge of energy seemed to saturate Taylor, who found his body unable to resist the urge to attack. He swung his right arm from high to low and across, which the chancellor dodged easily, but it was only a feint for a roundhouse kick coming up behind that the chancellor barely managed to get a forearm in front of. Everyone in the room gasped, but it was more that he’d launched an unannounced attack on the chancellor than that his blow had nearly connected.
“It’s him,” Chancellor Aggart said to the commander, who nodded quickly. The chancellor stormed out and the units left the bleachers, many of them sneering at Taylor as they passed. Certainly the encounter had been a success, but Taylor was convinced that the chancellor had chosen him for another reason, possibly because the man knew his real identity.
When Taylor reported for duty as the chancellor’s personal guard for the first time, he was convinced he’d be used as some sort of hostage to get to Randall, who had already begun work on his campaign, the election just two months away.
Taylor’s shift was early in the cycle, requiring him to procure a tray supporting the chancellor’s breakfast and a special newspaper made just for him called Early Edition. He checked in with the door guards and proceeded to Aggart’s suite, a combination of office space, personal quarters, and private museum of relics dating back even further than the founding of Cumeria.
After passing through a few rooms, one for reception and another for training, he found the broad-shouldered chancellor hunching over some papers at a desk that seemed made for a child by comparison. Taylor’s new boss glanced up and waved him over to set the tray on the edge of the desk.
“Name.”
“Roark Cardan, sir,” Taylor replied, paying all due respect and yet still searching for signs that he’d been recognized.
“Where you from?”
“East coast, south of Ristle, sir,” he answered, selecting a location just close enough to the ClawLands that any accent in his voice would be glossed over.
Taylor didn’t realize the conversation had ended until Aggart shifted and glared at him. He quickly took his position by the door and began what was sure to be a
n interminable amount of standing in place. To his surprise, the chancellor again addressed him.
“I don’t know what they told you about what you’re supposed to be doing, but let me break it down to three easy rules. One, if there’s a bullet coming for me, get in its way. Two, if there’s a man coming for me, get out of the way. Three, if you come for me—and believe me, you wouldn’t be the first—I’ll show you pain you can’t even dream of.”
Lying his way through the Guard had prepared Taylor to keep a straight face even when he’d been called out. There was no way Chancellor Aggart could know that Taylor’s entire purpose of being there was to find a way to kill him, and yet with so many enemies the man must’ve known that his poor, well-trained, and likely overconfident guards were the ones most likely to be swayed by offers of rich rewards for taking him out. The chancellor picked up the paper and read every word of it.
Taylor spent the hours watching him diligently, following him from room to room as he went about performing his responsibilities, keeping vigilant about any sign of recognition, and always watching for a shred of weakness that could be exploited. There were weapons on the wall, knives and swords, that would be easy enough to pick up and charge with, but Taylor had no faith the chancellor wouldn’t find one, too, and strike him down. As it was, Aggart was likely watching Taylor just as intently, and it’d be years before his alertness faded, if ever.
No, Taylor was going to need to find another way to finish his job, thus making Randall Chancellor by default and raising the Bracken family back to the top of the Cumerian power structure. It was perhaps the most audacious part of his father’s master plan, and at the time Taylor thought there was nothing he couldn’t do, but coming face to face with the chancellor made him realize exactly how tough it would be.
As the two of them passed through a hall together, Taylor glanced through an open doorway and saw what had to be the actual cudgel used by Triton Kniviscent. The chancellor, keenly aware of what was going on, laughed.
“Hard to miss, isn’t it? Better have a look now or you’ll be distracted every time we walk by,” Aggart said, leading Taylor into a small room with ropes and chains suspending the cudgel at the opposite end.
“How could anyone lift that?” Taylor asked. Even with the unnatural energy flowing through his veins, that chunk of steel would sooner tear his arms off at the shoulders than be lifted.
“Triton was a lowly smithy of prodigious strength who killed his master, encased that sword in a bulky ball of steel, and then wielded it throughout the country to fight off the southern lords who were occupying this northern continent of Domorand. Do you know the origins of the Vendetta Clause?”
Taylor looked at the chancellor, whose voice had a deep bellow to it that he felt in his chest.
“Not really,” he answered.
“I’m not surprised. It’s not something they teach to the children in school. Many of these southern lords had a particular method of torturing and killing that they liked to use on the native population. The rack, drawing and quartering, drowning, being burned to death, buried alive, and so on. In the name of the victims, Triton served his justice by punishing them with the same method they used and called himself innocent for those crimes because he carried out the vendetta on behalf of the victims,” he explained.
Taylor nodded, wondering what things were really like back then when this wholesale slaughter was going on.
“I understand, but it still seems like a strange thing to put in the laws.”
“Actually, how it became law is a completely different story. Triton couldn’t read or write, and once the revolution had ended and the chartering of Cumeria had begun, there were two legislators named Borockni and Loup who jousted in these foundational documents here, making notes subtly jamming the other.”
On the left side of the room was a tome with a plaque above reading, “The Book of Cumeria.” Although Taylor had seen reproduced excerpts, he’d never realized how much had been crossed out and written in the margins. Aggart looked longingly at the book, becoming almost wistful.
“Loup attempted to outwit Borockni by inserting a passage marking the river delta south of Lynxstra, where Borockni was from, as outside the territory of Cumeria right before bringing the bill up for a vote, which would have invalidated all of Borockni’s contributions. But someone noticed it at the last moment, the passage was defeated, and they inserted the Vendetta Clause along with a new passage marking Loup’s hometown of Olim on the far east side of Lyria as foreign territory, which is why that area isn’t part of Cumeria today.”
Taylor had to admit that hearing the nearly reverential way the chancellor spoke of early Cumeria made him see him in a different light. There was no doubt he’d do what he needed to do, but at the same time he couldn’t deny that Aggart had a fondness for the country and its founding that was befitting for someone in his position. Would his half-brother feel the same way?
As Taylor looked longingly at the old style of writing in the book, daring to flip a page to see what came next, he barely noticed the chancellor slipping away to return to his desk. Taylor let his fingertips run along the old, thick paper, which had some grit on it that was almost imperceptible.
Taylor got the hang of his new job over the next few cycles and began to get a sense of the chancellor’s routines, his moods, and his habits. Always keenly aware of the clock, Taylor knew that his time to make a move was rapidly approaching, and he waited until the end of his next shift to get started on a plan to fulfill his obligation to the black contract.
Heading out alone to the northeast of Toine with a light pack, he entered one of the few forested areas of the country that hadn’t been clear-cut and replanted at one time or another. It was known as the tired wood because of the Avelyn trees’ drooping branches and lazy roots that never bothered to dive into the ground. Moss, mushrooms, and dappled sunlight coming through from above covered everything. Other than the occasional birdcall, not a sound could be heard in the entire forest.
Feeling as if he’d left all of humanity behind, Taylor found satisfaction in his trek deeper and deeper into the heart of the tired wood. He was searching for something in particular, not rare exactly but impossible to find except for those who knew where to look for it. As it happened, the Youth Guard taught him more than just how to fight.
When Taylor came to a fallen and rotting Niscus tree leaning against an Avelyn in such a way that sunlight could still graze the lower side, he opened his pack and began pulling out his supplies. A mask, thick gloves, and a smock were all necessary to handle the deadly fungus growing underneath, which was known as Full Tense for the way it slowly locked muscles in their flexed positions until the victim could no longer move or exhale.
Using the edge of a knife, he scraped white chunks of the fungus onto a metal sheet until it was full then sat down to crush each chunk with the flat edge of the blade. Once they were all as broken up as possible, he ground them into a fine powder using a mortar and pestle, used a sifter to strain out any other material, and stored the powder in a drinking canister for transport back into Toine.
Since becoming part of Chancellor Aggart’s personal guard, Taylor’s living arrangements had changed. He had a private room now, if a small one, that gave him space enough to combine the powder with a saline solution in a large tray that needed a couple of cycles to evaporate to the proper viscosity. During that time, he’d need to stay out of his room and find a hidden spot to sleep in one of the city’s parks.
But getting used to ants crawling on him made for a hard night’s sleep, and he arrived for his early shift at the top of the Spiral feeling saturated with exhaustion. He knew before even opening the door that looking unusually tired might set off alarm bells in Aggart’s mind, so he forced himself not to let it show. The first step to killing the chancellor was looking like he wasn’t having trouble staying awake.
A long meeting on the docket directly after the chancellor’s breakfast and paper-reading t
ime made staying awake seem like it’d be an impossible feat, but he dutifully followed his boss in as they welcomed a visiting emissary from Lyria. The stout man was bumbling and wore dark sunglasses completely obscuring his eyes. Taylor immediately gathered that the man did not want to be there talking to the chancellor. His father, Lowell, would’ve said the emissary had already lost before the negotiating had begun. The only question was how much he would lose.
Chancellor Aggart slid into a chair in the middle of one side of a polished granite table that seemed to have a number of dents, cracks, and barely-noticeable stains. The emissary plopped into a chair on the other side and removed some papers from his satchel. Taylor stood by the door and remained silent during the pleasantries and beyond.
“As you can see here, humanitarian aid is desperately needed in these regions. It’s not just the fighting that’s taking its toll on these groups; their inability to fulfill trade agreements with Lyria is dragging down the economic output of the entire nation,” the emissary explained.
A quick glance at the map made it clear why the visitor from Lyria was shaking in his boots. Many of the areas he was talking about delivering aid to were ones that the premier families and the government were directly in conflict with. These were regions most likely to vote for Randall in the upcoming election, and handing over supplies could intensify the fighting and threaten the chancellor himself.
Aggart casually eyed the papers, swallowed, and put his elbows on the table.
“What makes you think the Cumerian government is not able to take care of its own people?” he asked, leaning back. The emissary, nonplussed, looked around from the papers in front of him to the paintings on the wall to Taylor and back.
“Your Chancellorship, you must be aware of the impact the fighting is having. When the supply chain in Cumeria between the premier families shut down, that left scores of people without food and other essentials. The worst of winter is coming, and without supplies countless citizens won’t survive. Surely you won’t begrudge some free assistance from your neighbors to the north, no strings attached.”
