The King's Blood

by S. E. Zbasnik

  "Yes, yes," the priest muttered, "Would you mind pointing that marvel away from my face?"

  "Oh, sorry," Aldrin replaced the metal shield.

  "This cavern is gigantic," Ciara said diplomatically, "Our best hope is to split up. Aldrin and I will plumb this 'gift shop' and you three poke through whatever lies to the right."

  The three were each about to start to argue, but paused as they heard the same intake of breath around them. None wanted to be blamed for another fight and waited for someone else to go first.

  "No objections? Good," Ciara said, and grabbing the prince who was still pushing buttons on his find, walked away smiling.

  Aldrin raised his metal toy up high. After some retina searing experimentation, he found a setting of holes that dimmed the light well enough for a picky blonde girl who liked to break into wildlife homes. Ciara picked up a rotted board laying across the doorway, nearly Kynton long, that broke in half in her hands. Only the Elven word for "Gift" and the smaller "You break it" remained in her fingers while the rest splintered onto the ground.

  She tossed the old sign behind her into the distance, and tried to wipe her hands off on cold metal pants. "We'll be lucky if there isn't some ancient curse laid across every stone in this tomb."

  "Or a nasty slumbering disease," Aldrin responded as he peered into the doorway. "Ladies first?"

  "I'm not a Lady, remember?" Ciara chided kindly, trying to weasel out of her own plan. The black void before her was fuller than it should be.

  "True," Aldrin said, nodding as his fingers curled around the doorframe, "You're actually competent."

  She laughed at that, surprised to share a rare under the stairs moment with the...was he a prince now that his brother was King? That whole royal succession always got a bit messy when there were extra males flopping about. Lightly tapping her fingers against his back, Ciara sighed and inched her foot forward into the Gift Shoppe of the Damned. The light cascaded around a room awkwardly built in an "L" shape, all the better to let young, bored devils slip from their pilgrim parent's vision and pile all of the stuffed dollies of Fredrick the Penitent under the Headman's Axe with Real Blade Action™! Most of the shelves long ago crumbled in on themselves, taking the merchandise with them. Powdered soup mixes split and scattered like holy ash upon a pile of toes marked to belong to Margoth the Fleet Footed. Judging by the pile, he must have been unnaturally quick thanks to owning upwards of twelve legs.

  A set of oversized quills poked out of a now rather useless drum. Aldrin settled his lantern on the desk in the middle of the room and grabbed one of the quills. The feather was thicker than his thumb. "How can anyone write with this thing?" he asked, attempting a few pen scratches on the head of the drum coated in inky doodles and various names who no longer seemed to be here. Ciara shook her head, hoping that whatever bird supplied those feathers was long extinct, and kicked her armored boot into a stack of old books that all spoke of "The Beauty of the Hills!" with rather contrived paintings of undulating farmland. A few pieces of thick parchment scattered, each with the same drawing of the tomb and a jaunty "Wish You Were Here!"

  "I..." she'd been gnawing on this thought since the Queen's camp, but hadn't found the proper chance to digest it. Aldrin's accidentally bringing up her lineage forced her hand, "I overheard about the Tower and it falling."

  The Prince stabbed the quill back into the drum, most of the feathers shedding from his warm touch. His mind trapped in a small panic, he absently picked the desiccated feathers up and tried to attach them back to the quill, but it wasn't having any of this nonsense. "The sword, that's what the Emperor wants. It's part of the Cas prophecy Medwin spoke of, tucked in the middle of that recipe book we've followed," he babbled things she already knew as if he were trying to convince himself of his plans, "'Let the potatoes simmer in an equal mix of butter and hog's fat for ten minutes. And with the Blade of Casamir, Slice free the bonds of the world. Do not forget to turn halfway or the taters will burn.'"

  He let the feathers finally slip to the drumhead, but kept staring at his useless fingers, "So I thought we get the sword before Vasska does and use it to trade back for his prisoners."

  Ciara said slowly, her mind still digging back through the taters, "What about Isa?"

  "I don't think we could trade her for much, maybe a loaf of bread or a couple sugar mice?" The prince didn't crack a smile, always afraid that his attempt at humor would just get him in more trouble.

  But Ciara did smile and moved closer to him, knocking over a pile of posters plastered with an action drawing of Cas mid Dragon Slay. "If you give Vasska the sword, the witch may try and kill you."

  "Yeah," Aldrin admitted, knowing his plan had a few deadly holes in it, like having to trust an Emperor so far gone he could see himself arriving, "but it is many lives for one."

  His eyes dropped past her shoulder as the weight of being about as useful as a saddlebag on a carted horse hung in his self-deprecating air. Henrik was King, Aldrin was the boy hiding under knight's knees. But Ciara gently touched his cheek, her hand an enriching warmth in this forbidden tomb.

  "Don't be so quick to toss the one away," she said as her fingers cupped around his still widening jaw and pulled him close.

  "I said 'Don't Touch The Skeleton!'"

  Isa's voice echoed through the walls, colder than the dead she disturbed with her boom. For being so small, it was difficult to discern where she kept so much air. Ciara sighed and rolled her eyes at the interruption.

  "No you didn't, you said 'Touch the Skeleton, I bet it's got gold in it,'" Kynton argued back, his baritone easily breaking across the shuddering stones.

  Aldrin placed his hand overtop Ciara's, wishing he'd taken his damn gloves off, and shrugged his shoulders. Interrupting was what their companions were best at.

  "He is correct," Taban backed up the priest, their voices growing nearer, "unfortunately."

  A wicked little smile took hold of Ciara's mouth, and -- as the bickering members drew ever closer -- she crushed her lips to Aldrin's. He was as prepared as last time, but rebounded a bit quicker as a small bit of her tongue slipped into his mouth.

  "By the elements, does anyone have a bucket?!" Isa yelled as she spotted the two macking on top of a pile of rusted Rings of Power (with real Volcano Melting Action™).

  Aldrin broke away and, trying to act sly, punched himself in the back of his head with his armored hand. Ciara took in the witch's glare and calmly raised an eyebrow at her.

  "Wha' we missed the orgy?" Kynton asked climbing over the rubble and rubbing his own head where a dragon egg was already rising. Isa's icy death glare broke from Ciara to the priest who still had the skeleton's hand clinging to his waistband. Taban's face, covered in white ash, poked around the corner sizing up the kids shifting further away from each other under adult supervision.

  "What in the pantheon happened to you three?" Ciara asked, the blue glow from Isa's vibrating fist highlighting a strange slime dripping off the witch's hair and onto her shoulders.

  A large glob succumb to gravity and she shuddered, stepping hard onto Kynton's foot, "You do not wish to know."

  Aldrin, now trying to tenderly rub the damage he did to himself, looked over at Ciara who was trying to bury a growing laugh. "Did you find anything?" his voice asked carefully, uncertain who had the upper hand at the moment.

  "Bones, bones, and more bones," Kynton said, waving what had once been someone's humorous as though it were a magic wand.

  "May the dead live in your underthings," Isa cursed the priest who got caught in a skeleton avalanche.

  "I haven't washed these in a few hundred miles. I'm certain they already do," he answered back, before tossing the bone onto the pile of old soup mixes. "Oooh, rocks!" the priest shouted before diving his fists deep into a standing barrel full of polished rocks.

  "It seems this became a place for locals to store their dead," Taban said, trying to project over the clackity clack of rocks sifting through hands and being tossed to
the ground. "There were numerous gravestones and indentations in the walls stacked high with previous pilgrims."

  "Pilgrims or sacrifices?" Isa put the thought out there.

  "Nonsense, they didn't have the proper tool marks on their bones to have been sacrifices," Kynton called jauntily from his barrel, "Ooh, malachite!"

  "By Scepticar's Mustache, how do you know what sacrificed bones look like?" Aldrin asked, partially terrified and partially curious.

  Kynton looked up at the wash of faces staring at him as if he'd grown a full sized goblin off the back of his head and let the few rocks in his hand slip through his fingers, "Lucky guess?"

  The others stared the priest down, but he gave up no more, walking smugly to Isa's side as the witch tried to slide away from him. "Is there anything in that book of yours?" she asked the boy king.

  His fingers slipped to the pack that became his whole life, and extracted out the Cookbook. It fell open to the page about the taters and prophecies, but he flipped back, trying to hunt out the specific address instructions for return. Ciara glanced behind her, afraid she felt something shifting in the section of the shop devoted to graphic tunics, but nothing moved in the shadows.

  "'If Found Please Return to Khud c/o Immir, 506th st and Leighton; Cas's Tomb and Gift Shoppe,'" Aldrin repeated again as he read over the inscription. "Wait, there's a bit more here. 'If not in, slide through slot in back wall and have a peasant day.'" The prince closed the book and looked up as if he solved all their problems.

  "And..." the witch prompted, breaking the dusty stalemate.

  "And what?" Aldrin countered, rounding on the woman who could be his death.

  "It's a key!" the priest shouted out and jumped a bit as his own voice echoed back. "You know, in the old...come on, you have to know what I'm talking about," he stared accusingly at Taban as if the assassin spent all his time pushing things into slots instead of drawing his own slots with daggers.

  "Like old Dwarven ruins, or the crafty wreckage from the Elven ships that washed up on the Dunlaw shore," Kynton continued to the stony audience.

  Taban's face shifted, the chalk highlighting the lines of disapproval as he said coldly, "There is no such thing."

  "Yeah, okay, right," Kynton tried to lean away from the assassin and closer to the witch, who was eyeing up his kidneys for a potion, "My point is they always had a trick, or a switch, or a key." He pointed at the mystical cookbook that had an unidentifiable gravy stain across most of the outside pages.

  "You put the key in the slot and Brabur's Your Demon, the wall opens and there's a chest full of treasure," the priest finished excitedly, bouncing up and finally noticing the bony hand trying to make its way down his trousers.

  Aldrin shifted the book around in his hands, hoping to find some mystical writing, or glowing etchings, or instructions. Crossing her arms, Ciara said pragmatically, "We find the slot we may as well try it. The most we'll be out of is a cookbook and the recipe for djinn mustard sauce."

  The prince shrugged and slid his pack, still overloaded with their other books, onto his back. "Let's go find a slot?" he said.

  "You were doing enough of that alone, princeling," Isa chided, "we're all coming with you this time."

  Aldrin sputtered into his hand, trying to force a "that's not what I meant" around the bolus of embarrassment as the others followed behind the smirking witch and her light stone. A few gazeless skulls rocked back and forth across the cobblestones; the handful that didn't shatter in the unexpected bone drop.

  The witch didn't look down as her feet crunched upon an ancient set of mandibles, like stomping through one of the spider nests that sprung up near the leaning stones that glowed at night. Those things could get to the size of your head if you didn't take out the nest fast enough. Ciara glanced about at the fresh litter strewn across the walkway, the bones stained from the drip of the cave's rising water levels. It was as in the old tales of ogre nests or dragon hordes, bones of every shape and size tossed about like old toothpicks; or when her mother got on a health kick and tried to trick the knights into eating sprouts. She'd try for a few weeks before they'd find a closet near stuffed to full with the wretched things, then it was back to meat and meat.

  The girl turned first to the witch who was oblivious of her piercing gaze of "what the hell happened?" Kynton was poking some of the more interesting specimens with his borrowed humorous and muttering anatomical breaks under his breath. Only Taban seemed as disturbed as her by the scene of vulture cleaned carnage lying before them.

  The normally stout assassin was muttering under his breath in the loopy Dunner tongue and trying to step around the bones like a child playing the game of trying to crack your mother's back. "This is not right," he said sharply to Ciara, as his dancing pulled himself near her, "they were each a life once."

  "You end lives for a living," she said, uncertain if she'd ever understand the killer in their midst.

  "I do not play with the dead, it is a disgrace. The Maker will have a puzzle on her hands trying to reconstruct them all," his boots slid into a set of femurs, oddly fused together as if in an eternal cross and Taban shuddered again, before placing his hands to his heart, then his mouth.

  "You play the murderer in the light but the penitent priest in the cemetery?"

  "I am no priest," Taban muttered, nodding his head toward Kynton who placed a skull on his shoulder and started talking to it, "nor am I a murderer."

  "Semantics, a game people with a guilty conscience play," Ciara muttered, glancing towards Aldrin as he tried to skirt around the bones with his back pressed against the wall.

  "Would you label your own flesh a murderer?" Taban asked her, his own eyes dismissing the child prince.

  Ciara snapped at him, her finger rising as if it could do something against the man who honed his body to kill, "That's...!" But Taban only folded his arms, getting his footing beneath him as he rose to stare into her accusing eyes. "None of your business," she finished lamely, looking away.

  The assassin continued to watch Aldrin, who kept trying to bat the sweaty hair of out his face and accidentally poked himself in the eye, "Your boy king, he will have to kill, to murder, if not to claim his crown then to keep it. Or face the sword himself."

  Ciara followed his line to the boy king, the prince, who finally felt the stares upon him and rose higher, waving his lantern in a friendly greeting. This caused him to vanish in the dancing shadows. "You know that all for certain? Kill or be killed?"

  Taban laughed cruelly, "That is all politics is, Nightingale. You simply pray to whichever god you wish that each death is worth it."

  "Are they?" she asked him seriously, wondering how much anyone could take upon their soul to offset the gains.

  The assassin folded his hands up as if he were about to pray and said, "I do not know. I doubt I will until I stand naked before the Black Gates."

  "Ah!" Aldrin's voice rang out across the stones, echoing into the far chamber that Kynton leaned upon, accidentally releasing the entire contents of the catacombs in one boney cacophony. "I believe I have found the slot."

  It took more than a bit of double backing to get everyone over to Aldrin's wall, a small side piece further into the cave to the left from the gift shop. The prince was poking about at the icy black stones, smooth as glass. There was almost nothing to the wall except a narrow slot and some writing above it in a few languages.

  Aldrin pointed to the sharp edge where the wall jutted out from the rest of its brethren, "I rammed my shin on the corner there," he needlessly explained as the others flocked around him, "and then poked about a bit until I spotted the writing and this," he emphasized the slot by sliding his hand in.

  "Well ol' stabby?" Kynton asked Taban, "what's it say?"

  The assassin grinned wickedly, "'Anyone who places their hand inside shall have it sliced off,'" and then chuckled as Aldrin yanked his questing appendage back as if it were bit, "and then some random numbers mentioning the dates at which returns will co
unt for another day. It makes little sense."

  "Only one way to see if the key fits," Kynton said, nudging Aldrin in the back with his friend the skull.

  The prince fidgeted with his lantern before setting it down on the ground; the light burst through the top and twisted his face into something ghoulish. He nipped into his pack and pulled out their trusty cookbook, a piece the three of them very nearly lost their lives for. And got saddled with Kynton. Aldrin looked at Ciara, who stood behind the assassin, still peering over his shoulder. She nodded softly.

  Aldrin swallowed hard and, carefully lining up the book, said a small prayer to any god that was listening before giving the spine a good shove. Gravity took over quickly, and yanked the book down a sliding chute where it landed with a hard thud on the other side.

  Eyes searched about the room watching, waiting, hoping, then growing angry. After a few more beats of absolutely nothing happening, Aldrin kicked at the wall. "Come on you stupid thing, do...something!" he cried.

  Kynton, unimpressed by the power of whoever thought a book would make a good key, wandered off, chattering to his skull friend. The disappointed glare of the witch followed the priest, disturbed she was going to be stuck with the jabbering idiot for even longer. The others would probably look unkindly upon her if she killed him now. Taban shook his head, and trailed after the priest, afraid the moron was about to unleash another torrential rain of bones upon them.

  Aldrin punched his fist against the unforgiving wall, which answered back by crushing his fingers. "Damn it!" he cried, sliding down to his knees. "Scepticar, Bathar, Nital, and all the rest of them damn you to wherever walls are damned!" His shoulders shook in anger and disgust at failing everyone and everything. No tears would come in his rage at himself, only the crushing realization of defeat.

  A calming hand fell atop his head, ruffling about his hair. Like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum about a broken toy, he looked up at the woman who should be scolding him. Instead Ciara's face softened in concern, "We'll get through it."