Fallen Victors

by Jonathan Lenahan

  He had a name to thank for reminding him of his own mortality: Mendoza. A name he’d not heard before, but that was of no surprise – too long out of touch with the people who’d once cheered his name. According to the wounded prisoner, Mendoza had instructed them to attack and kill everybody in the camp; no mention of valuables, which meant Mendoza was no ordinary highwayman. He’d wanted them dead for a reason, something more than simple robbery, and Alocar intended to find out why.

  Past evening now, people roamed the streets, mostly men wearing drab clothing, nothing brighter than hunter’s green. Some planted their feet on the King’s Road, conversing, but most made their way to its left-hand side, where an open door spilled light and music, mingled with what sounded like good-hearted yelling. Isaac waited for him inside the gate, astride his horse, his chin nestled in his palm as he watched them approach.

  Alocar drew up next to him, putting a hand out to slow the mule. “Find a healer?”

  Isaac nodded, and Alocar gestured with his free hand for Isaac to take the lead.

  Alocar’s eyes took in the rest of the town. The buildings were made from sturdy grey stone, and the stairs were punishing, rising to the height of two men before allowing their guests to enter the front door. Flat, the roofs made Alocar think that the Idranian flooded on occasion, forcing the buildings’ occupants onto the protection of higher ground.

  “Fancy trying to break into one of those houses? You’d need an army for each one,” Alocar said.

  Isaac nodded but didn’t reply.

  “Perfect defense, really, those stairs. Wouldn’t be able to find a man in a thousand who’d want to rush them alone. Good way to get your head creased.”

  Still, no reply.

  They turned between two buildings and threaded their way down an alley. On the other side sat a small house with a sign displaying a scalpel and leaf drawn in black ink. A green wooden fence stretched around the premises. This house, for whatever reason, lacked the stairs of the others, and its door was set on ground level. Isaac got off his horse and knotted it to the post just inside the gate, and Alocar followed suit, avoiding a bite from the cankerous mule as he tied it between the two mounts.

  His old knees creaking, Alocar unbound the wounded prisoner from the saddle and let the limp body fall over his shoulder. He shuffled toward the house, his steps the length of a blind man’s in a new house. Isaac knocked and then stepped back to let Alocar stand in front of the door, a curious thing no more than six feet high, like it was built for dwarves.

  Seconds turned into minutes, taunting him. His knees shook. It felt like the prisoner had grabbed handfuls of bricks to shove in his pockets. The door opened – too quickly. Alocar croaked and tumbled backward; the wounded man hit the ground and bounced. Somebody squeaked. Hopefully that wasn’t Isaac. He lay on the ground, his breath hammered out of him. Somebody chuckled. It grew in strength until Alocar found the energy to turn his head. Isaac’s face looked down at him.

  “May I help you gentlemen?” Alocar inclined his head toward the speaker: a shade over five feet, glasses hovering over the tip of his nose, one lens cracked. Both of the man’s hands were stuffed in his pockets. The wounded prisoner groaned. Alocar empathized.

  Isaac took a step back, and Alocar pushed himself to his feet. The speaker’s glasses magnified his blue orbs, which bounced around, settling on Alocar momentarily before moving to Isaac and then into empty space.

  “You’re the doctor?”

  He gestured to a plaque affixed to the right of the door that read “Doctor Emosa” in plain font. “I am he, though I’m normally only on call by appointment unless it’s an emergency, and in your case . . .” his brilliant blue eyes took in the unconscious prisoner, still on the ground. “And in your case, it looks like you qualify as an emergency. Would you like to come inside? I’ve just put on some tea, but I’m afraid I don’t have any food ready. Come in, come in.” He turned and made his way back into the house, leaving the two of them in front of the pint-sized door.

  Alocar slapped Isaac on the back, and the little man jumped. “Nice job finding a doctor so fast. I didn’t know if one even lived in the area.” Like a flower after a long drought, Isaac’s shoulders straightened, if only a tad.

  Before Alocar picked up the prisoner, he felt a small nudge in his ribs. Isaac pointed to the feet and moved there. He lifted them and looked to Alocar, who nodded and picked up the wounded man’s shoulders.

  They ducked inside. The doctor hadn’t gone far, and he eased the door shut behind them, locking it in place with a bolt, and then another. “Keep out the heathens, you see,” He wiped his eyeglasses on his sleeve, which stopped a few inches short of his bony wrists.

  He pointed to a high settee, covered in paper. “Place him in there. Don’t worry about the mess, I’ve seen worse. Yes, there. Thank you.”

  “On three,” Alocar said. “One. Two. Three!” They heaved the wounded man onto the settee, his bandages dark with blood. Free of the burden, Alocar knuckled his back. Maybe the doctor had time to spare for a broken general.

  His arms teeming with supplies, from herbs to scissors to bandages to sharp instruments that made Alocar rethink his request, Doctor Emosa reentered the room. “What’s wrong with our man, hmmm?” He leaned closer and pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose.

  “Took a bolt to the leg. Lost a pretty good bit of blood before we were able to patch him up. It’s been a few days since we found him, so we did the best we could.”

  “Found him?” Doctor Emosa looked at Alocar with a raised brow.

  “Found him.” Alocar clenched his jaw. “Do we owe you anything?”

  “Nah, I know this boy’s employer. I’ll put it on his bill, or he’ll owe me a favor, one or the other. Go, go sit in my parlor.” He shooed the two of them toward a door in the back. “I’ll be there in a little while.”

  Alocar and Isaac found themselves in a small room. An armoire stood against the rear wall, carvings of different wild animals on top its many shelves: a wolf with a shortened forelimb, an eagle with a beak too long, a fish with wildly different sized scales, and more – no master craftsmen here. Books lined the wall in front of the carvings. A single vase dominated the room’s center, flowers poking from it, and four chairs surrounded it, so that when you sat, the vase obstructed the opposite person’s face.

  Once they’d seated themselves next to each other, squirmed and gotten comfortable, Alocar said, “Thanks for your help so far.”

  Isaac tilted his head, a crow observing a shiny bauble.

  “I know you don’t say much,” Alocar put his hands on the armrests, “and I don’t know if you even like any of us, but sometimes a group needs that. Not everybody can be a leader, and being somebody who can follow is, well, it’s – ah, it’s something that I was never good at, personally. A leader is nothing without people that will help him, and you’ve been just that, so far. I just wanted to let you know that you play an important role in our group, regardless of what others may say or think.”

  Alocar shut his mouth, slightly embarrassed but knowing that the words had needed to be said – part of a leader’s job was to keep his company’s morale up. After a while, Doctor Emosa walked into the room. He sat in front of Alocar, the flowers blocking his face. “Isn’t this an interesting setup?” the doctor asked. “I’ve always wanted to see how much human communication relies on body language, and you’d be surprised out how much can be revealed by a simple vase of flowers.”

  “What do you mean?” Alocar forced himself not to lean around the vase.

  “A variety of things, really. How am I talking to you right now? Am I being condescending, because you don’t know what I’m referring to, or am I being more of an educator, trying to teach a pupil a new lesson? Or maybe this nothing more than poorly formulated joke. But can you tell?”

  “No,” Alocar admitted. He saw the doctor’s feet move, settled across each other.

  “Precisely. Our body language, more so
than anything we ever say, gives information about our moods and our psyche. Why, imagine all our voices speaking in a vacuum. We’d have to invent an entire new method of communication, were that the case. Just talking is never enough.”

  Alocar thought back to the ride after the battle, his fleeting depression about his aging body. He shook his head. The doctor was right. Alocar Leyton owned this body, and it would follow his orders. He sat up a few inches, his face resolute in spite of the sharp pain that flared in his lower back.

  “At any rate,” the doctor removed the vase from its table and set it on the floor next to him, “your man is patched up right and proper. I’ll let him stay in here a while. Infection can be a nasty thing if left unattended, but let’s skip to the meaty parts: I know his boss, and I suspect you do as well. Now, I don’t mind helping a soul in need, but I don’t know you two well enough to risk my good health in a lie. Us doctors operating on ourselves never goes too well. Does that make sense?”

  “Perfectly.” Alocar’s eyes pinned the doctor to his chair. “If you weren’t able to send this man back to his boss for a few days,” he slid some gold coins across the table, “I’d find myself in your debt.”

  Doctor Emosa clasped Alocar’s hand, returning the gold coins to Alocar’s fingers. “I’m a doctor, you see. I need to monitor his condition for the next day or two, so an extra won’t hurt, but I give you no promises. I’d say that I hope to see you again, but that sounds strange coming from a doctor’s mouth, so I wish you the best.”

  They left the house. Alocar yanked his hand from the mule’s nip as he untied its rope. The houses seemed to scrape the clouds, reminding Alocar of the ambush and the fiery ray that had shot from Isaac into the sky.

  “Oh, Isaac? That beam of light on the road? It’s time to come clean with that. We’re a group, and we need to start trusting each other.”

  “Okay,” Isaac said.

  Alocar blinked. The night held more than one kind of surprise, after all.

  Isaac

  “And I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and all shall eat the flesh of their neighbors in the siege, and in the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their life afflict them.” The Cao Fen quotation was carved into the inn’s red wood banister. Its outer walls were bricked, if not uniform red, then something close, and the doors opened smoothly upon the slightest push, to reveal a full bar, most of its patrons wearing clothes still dusty from their travels and, for the moment, well-behaved.

  Isaac’s hand twitched beneath his overcoat, his thumb and ring finger connecting. Crowds were for people like Slate, not him, and with his seclusion in Whispers now a part of him, he felt like sitting outside until the room had cleared.

  Alocar pulled out a chair next to Slate and left Isaac the one by Crymson. “Thanks for ordering us something.”

  “Didn’t know when you’d be back,” said Slate between bites of gristly meat. Fat dripped from both his hands, and he held the fork like a weapon. It stabbed into the meat, and Slate sawed it back and forth, ignoring the knife. Evidently good food and other people had revitalized his interest in being part of the group.

  Isaac’s mind drifted back to the road, where Slate had stolen Teacher away from him, but only, it seemed, because Slate had missed his friend. He looked at Teacher, who had his teeth clenched around a piece of meat that he held in both hands. Grease dribbled down his chin with reckless abandon. Maybe Slate ate that way to make Teacher feel more comfortable, but, then again, Isaac remembered Slate stabbing the wounded man in the heart after the battle on the road, so maybe he was just a brute.

  Crymson sat and watched, her own plate untouched and her eyes tight around the corners.

  “We need to leave early tomorrow,” Alocar said. “Restock our supplies at first light. That man we brought back, well,” his eyes took in the room, “his boss is in town. Isaac and I managed to stall it, but we best not push our luck.”

  “Sounds good to me.” Slate yawned and pushed back his chair, stretching his arms over his head. “It’s past this boy’s bedtime. Room is on the second floor. First door on the right. Me and Teach are going to turn in.”

  “Bet he takes the only bed,” Crymson said as Slate and Teacher walked up the stairs. “Remind me again why we didn’t just get two rooms.”

  “Safer,” Alocar replied.

  A bed would be nice, but sleeping on the floor didn’t particularly bother Isaac. Whispers had rid him of any fear of discomfort, and traveling on the King’s Road had only reinforced this concept; once asleep, it didn’t matter where his head lay.

  Alocar chuckled. “You’re probably right about the bed, though.”

  Isaac’s eyes flicked to Alocar and then back at the table. He reflected on how laughs came in different forms: some were ironic, done only so that one didn’t cry; others were sarcastic, showing one’s contempt for another, but earlier, at Doctor Emosa’s, Isaac had nearly choked at Alocar’s tumble, and the laughter had burst from him without bothering for permission. That laughter had been the best kind, thought Isaac. Spontaneous, real, it had made him feel alive.

  At Crymson’s nod, Alocar reached over and speared her uneaten meat, “Well, Isaac, you know what I’m about to ask.”

  Isaac didn’t answer. Instead, he looked between his legs and snapped his fingers, small orange flames igniting on each nail, beginning at his thumb and then trailing down to his pinky, only to reverse the course and make its way back to his thumb.

  “Well?” Alocar said around a mouthful of food.

  Breathe. Inhale. Exhale. He gripped his pants and bundled the fabric through his fingers. “This stays in the group.” The venom in his voice surprised even him.

  Alocar’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth, but Isaac knew the risks in revealing his past: thanks to the Cao Fen’s witch-hunt against magic users, having a Blessed bloodline required the utmost secrecy. Knowing a Blessed’s true identity gave a person the most potent of blackmail, and if he were ever betrayed or discovered, that Blessed could find himself at the end of a hangman’s noose or worse – that much Isaac knew from experience.

  A drunk started yelling at the bar’s end, so Crymson pitched her voice higher. “Anything that hurts you, hurts us. We’ll keep your secrets.”

  Isaac folded his hands beneath the table. “How much do you know about us – the Blessed?”

  “More than most, but only from the Cao Fen’s records, and since there hasn’t been much mention of the Blessed in the last twenty years, my knowledge is more of a history lesson.” Crymson popped her jaw, the clicking audible. “Plus, I doubt the words were written verbatim. People have a habit of recording themselves in the best possible light, truth aside.”

  “And I know very little,” Alocar said. “Just rumors that my men might have shared and the occasional folktale, but that’s about it.”

  “Okay . . .” Isaac spoke into the table, unable to meet their eyes, “To start, there aren’t many of us left. We keep our abilities secret, even from each other. I’ve known only one, maybe two other Blessed in my life.”

  “Because of the Cao Fen, right?”

  “Right,” said Crymson, cutting Isaac off before he could answer. “A hundred years ago, more even, magic users were plentiful. But the Cao Fen decided that the Blessed were evil, in need of extermination, and they’ve systematically eradicated any they’ve come across for the last century, or at least that’s what people are supposed to believe. The Blessed are strong, but when an entire country turns against you, there isn’t much anybody can do.”

  The drunk started yelling again, and this time he stood, weaving and flailing against his would-be protectors. The crowd’s volume rose to drown him out.

  “What do you mean that’s what people are supposed to believe?” Alocar asked.

  “Well,” Crymson’s eyes tracked the drunk, “I’ll say this. We used the Blessed as a scapegoat for all of the world’s evils, and after a while, magic wen
t from being a boon to a curse. But the Cao Fen lied about the Blessed they captured. They told the world that they killed them, to stay in accordance with God’s word, and in reality, they subjugated them.”

  The drunk pushed one of the men next to him, and Alocar shifted to turn his face more toward the crowd as Crymson continued. “This is just rumor – I’m not high enough in the hierarchy to know conclusively – but I’ve heard they’ve kept a few of the more powerful ones that they captured and turned them into a cabal, one that’s been breeding for a few generations now.”

  “Which means, if you weren’t part of this group – ”

  “ – I’d be duty-bound to either capture or kill Isaac. Whichever proved simpler,” Crymson finished.

  “Pretty easy to remember your readings, now that the time has called for it,” Alocar said.

  “I can’t tell just anybo- ”

  The drunk escaped the men trying to manhandle him out the door. He sprinted to the back of the room, dodging tables and knocking over chairs. Isaac scooted closer to the wall, but Alocar stuck a foot out and the drunk went down in a tangle of limbs, where his pursuers pounced on him. One of them punched the drunk in the side of his head. “Goddammit Rotiche, you gotta’ do this every time we have a beer? Getting to be worse than your old man.”

  After they’d carried the drunk out the door, the room returned to its normal hum, and Alocar returned to his meal. “Okay, but what actually makes a Blessed, well, Blessed? And what kind of powers do they have? Some of my men used to tell me their source of power was blood, at least from certain types: babies, virgins, and the like.”

  Crymson waved her hand. “More Cao Fen falsehoods. The records were pretty explicit on this. They said the whole ‘blood of the innocents’ rumor was just a bit of fabrication to help bring the common people over to the Cao Fen’s side of things. The types of power, though, I’m not sure. The Cao Fen kept track of that type of thing, but it didn’t seem to have much order to it.”