Knight's Creed

by P. J. Cherubino

  Pleth decided to try reclaiming some of his authority on a matter that bothered him. “Dagbo, I don’t want you to strike the villagers anymore without my approval.” He mustered up the courage to make strong eye contact with the burly, violent man.

  “Are you getting soft, Pleth?” Dagbo asked. “You, as much as anybody, should know what it takes to keep villagers in line.”

  Pleth remembered recoiling in horror after Dagbo struck the old woman. They had roughed people up before. It was sometimes necessary, but an old woman… Pleth thought it had gone too far.

  Pleth made a lame attempt at convincing Dagbo to follow his lead. “You must understand when to use subtlety. An implied threat is often better than a billy club strike. People can get used to beatings and learn to return them. But if you keep up the psychological pressure—”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up,” Dagbo said.

  Pleth sat in wounded, brooding silence until they approached the Keep Gates.

  One of the fellow Assessors called out to him from his already-empty wagon. “Good evening, Assessor Pleth,” Clive said, addressing him in the most formal terms.

  “And to you, Assessor,” Pleth responded, putting on his most deferential voice.

  But it was obvious something was amiss. Clive came out from behind his wagon and stared rudely at the bedraggled assemblage of men.

  “Shit!” Clive gasped. “What happened to you!”

  “I’m not at liberty to say until I’ve been debriefed,” Pleth replied. That was true, and there was no way to avoid saying that. It told everyone within earshot that something reportable happened.

  “Do me a favor and don’t talk about this until I’ve made my report.”

  “Of course,” Clive replied. “I’ll hang out in the ale house until you’re done. The first drink is on me.”

  “Those ungrateful, scabby bandits,” one of the other Assessors within earshot grumbled. “Someone needs to do something about them. Threat to the order and an affront to the authority of the Protector.”

  Several others mumbled in agreement, then they formed a gossip gaggle and ambled toward the ale house.

  “Once you start the hens to clucking,” Donu said, climbing down painfully, “the news will spread like the flu.”

  Sure enough, while Pleth was supervising the care of horses by barking instructions everyone already knew, a young page ran up to him.

  “Begging your pardon, Assessor, sir,” the skinny teen said. “But Commissioner Krann wants to see you right now.”

  “Very good, boy,” Pleth mumbled, then turned away quickly to avoid tipping the page as was customary.

  Keeping his head down, Pleth grit his teeth and marched through the gates made from whole tree trunks. The cobblestones streaked by beneath his feet. He didn’t even bother to avoid one or two horse flops, instead opting to clear his boots on the wrought iron scraper by the administrative entrance. He was winded by the time he got to the top of the stone spiral staircase.

  “Come in, come in, you fool, and close the damn door. Flies, you know… Great Queen Bitch, but you reek of horse shit!” Krann exclaimed with a disgusted expression.

  Pleth moved to sit, but he was quickly halted.

  “Remain standing. This won’t take long.” Krann eyed the big man as he struggled to regain his breath. He looked Pleth up and down as he stepped out from behind his polished oak desk, swagger stick wedged under his armpit. “Robbed? When, where, and how much?”

  Even as he stammered his response, Pleth wondered how Krann had heard so quickly. “Near mile marker sixty, about four hours ago. They took half the haul.”

  “Four hours… ” Krann said. “At a fast walk, you should have been here two hours ago. Did they have their way with you?”

  “There were so many,” Pleth lied, stammering. All the careful lies he practiced evaporated in front of the short, wiry, gray-haired man who seemed woven from tendon and tight skin.

  “How many, precisely?” Krann said, putting a hand on his swagger stick.

  “We fought our way clear, so it was hard to say. We ran once my men fought them off… ”

  “Fought them off?” Krann said with a sinister smile. “But at what point did they take the time to make off with fully half of your collection?”

  “Ah… ” Pleth stuttered. “They attacked more than once, and… ”

  “Oh, shut up!” Krann yelled, slamming his stick along the edge of his desk. It looked as if he had cleared that section of workspace just to use the stick on it. “Your coward of a guard ran here with a pantload of piss and shit and told me the whole story. One! One woman at that. That’s who attacked you.”

  “I… I… ” Pleth stammered, feeling woozy. He stumbled toward a chair to right himself.

  “Yes, yes, ‘you, you,’” Krann mocked. “You’re only lucky that this bandit was a mage of some sort, or I’d suspect you of banditry.” Krann shook his head in disgust. “Oh, sit down if you must, you fat toad.” Krann sat down himself while Pleth lowered his over-sized ass to the chair.

  “I will levy an emergency leakage tax on my next rounds, sir,” Pleth said.

  “See that you do, or it will come out of your commission,” Krann said. “You are lucky I don’t dock you for lying to me. The guard who reported in first was a coward, but at least he isn’t a damn liar like you. If you lie to the Compliance Officer, I tremble at the thought of what might happen to you.”

  Pleth went pale, and his jowly face felt cold as his head trembled. “Compliance officers?”

  “Yes, you dolt.,” Krann spat. “You getting robbed seals it. Because of that other stranger we arrested and the common bandit in our lockup, I have no choice but to send for a compliance team. It’s in the damn regs. I have to report it and request a compliance check.”

  “Am I being audited?” Pleth asked in spite of himself.

  “Now, why the hell would you ask me that?” Krann barked, leaning across the desk with narrowed eyes.

  “I’ve never been audited before,” Pleth shot back, saving himself, ironically, with an honest statement.

  “And that’s why I’m not going to report your lie. I’ll chalk it up to shock. Up until today, you’ve been the best-performing Assessor I’ve put on the Toll Road. But you know as well as I do that an Assessor is only as good as his last collection. Yours, at present, is pitiful.”

  All the blood drained from Pleth’s face. His years of careful work to build trust evaporated in a single instant. The only reason he was able to maintain his tribute skimming ring was because he did everything by the book.

  If he was found out, his whole family would be evicted and exiled from the Protectorate with nothing but the clothes on their back.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Somewhere in the Forest, Lungu Protectorate

  Morning in the forest was magical. Astrid woke to red, then gold dawn light filtering through the trees and dancing through drops of dew clinging to the lower branches of the beech trees.

  Vincenzo was nowhere to be found—his bedroll was empty. When she got up to put a hand on it, she found it cold.

  “Stealthy fucker,” she muttered, looking around.

  Shrugging her shoulders, she rolled her bedding and started another fire in the smokeless pit she had dug the night before.

  It took a few minutes for her to find the pot Vincenzo had batted out of her hands the night before. Once she found it, she thoroughly rinsed it out, then filled it with tea from her water skin and squatted down by the fire.

  “Watched pots do boil,” she said to herself with a grin. Mocking that old-world saying always amused her. “Patience makes anything possible.” She added her father’s wisdom to the stupidity of the past.

  She only wished her father’s wisdom had saved her House from the fanatics who now infested it. Her land and its people were lost to her. In the end, the lies won. Minister Kostoff and his brainwashed minions ruled there now.

  Vincenzo came out of the woods with his cumbersome ba
g looking even more loaded down than it had before. He squatted by the fire and shucked off the bag. He pulled out six eggs wrapped in a red cloth, then dropped them into Astrid’s tea.

  “I was going to drink that,” Astrid complained.

  “But now you will have eggs,” Vincenzo replied with his usual cavalier aplomb, then tossed her a water skin. His strange accent brought a theatrical air to everything he said.

  No: he had tossed her a wine skin.

  “Is wine all you drink?” Astrid asked. “I require pure, plain water every once in awhile.”

  “To answer your question, yes. I mostly drink wine. And mead, and grog, and beer. I only drink water when absolutely necessary, and only then if it’s from a spring with the right energy.”

  Then, he pulled a green bottle from his pack and handed it to her. When she popped the cork, the water inside hissed.

  Astrid almost dropped the bottle. “What the… ”

  “It’s sparkling mineral water,” the strange man said.

  “Sparkling?”

  “You’ve never seen sparkling water?”

  Astrid held up the bottle before her eyes, then shaded it with her hands. “It doesn’t sparkle. Not that I can see.”

  Vincenzo laughed. “It’s a figure of speech. Gas is trapped in the water. When you open the bottle, the gas is released. Give it a try.”

  Astrid took a big slug, because she was thirsty. Water shot from her nose as she coughed. “It’s explosive water!” she exclaimed, coughing more.

  “Ah, the unwashed, ignorant masses,” Vincenzo said with an amused shake of his head.

  “Hey… ” Astrid scowled.

  “Have you looked in the mirror lately?”

  “I wash,” Astrid said, defensively. And after thinking for a moment, she followed that with, “I’ve been on a pilgrimage for three years… I just don’t wash that… often… ” She cleared her throat, taking another suspicious sniff of the water.

  “You look like a cave woman,” Vincenzo replied, matter-of-factly. “But a beautiful, strong cave woman.”

  “Nice save,” she replied in growling tones. She hid her amused grin behind the bottle.

  Astrid handed the bottle of “explosive” water back to the strange man and added more wood to the fire to make the eggs boil faster. Vincenzo pulled out a hunk of cured ham and cut thin slices. When he took out a loaf of bread, Astrid balked.

  “Last night’s dinner was twice as much as I’ve eaten in any one sitting in three years,” she confessed. “In fact, I’m still full. I’ll stick with the eggs, and I don’t want to know where you got them.”

  “Just as well,” Vincenzo replied with a shrug.

  Astrid once again took the bottle of sparkling water, curiosity getting the best of her. She tipped it back, giving it another shot as she drank it more carefully this time. Expecting its unfamiliar fizz allowed for a much different experience. “It has good energy, this water. You are right. It’s refreshing.”

  “That’s why I thought you would like it,” the man replied.

  “How did you come to this place?” Astrid asked. “The Protectorates, that is.”

  “I’m following the trail,” he replied, locking her eyes.

  “What trail is that?” she asked in a tone that told him that she thought he was a bit nutty.

  “The trail of magic,” he said.

  “Magic doesn’t have a trail,” Astrid said, taking another sip. “It’s all around us. We just draw from it like water from a well.”

  “That is a closer approximation to my theory than I’ve heard from any of the local superstitions I’ve encountered so far,” he said.

  “Superstition? Why do you say that?” Vinnie seemed to look around at various places in the forest for an answer that he didn’t bother to tell Astrid. “Hello? I’m waiting for an answer to that question,” Astrid demanded.

  “There. Right there. That’s part of my theory,” Vinnie said, suddenly animated. “You are waiting for an answer. That’s superstition. You pray, or you wave your hands, or do some such other thing, and you wait for something to happen based on old stories told to you by those who came before.

  “It is not so with me. I am seeking the answer. I’m after the true cause of magic. I don’t accept that it comes from words or rituals or gestures. All I can tell you is that it’s not what you think it is.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Astrid said. “My beliefs don’t require you to understand them for them to work.”

  “Precisely,” he said.

  The last point escaped Astrid. She shook her head. “The eggs look done,” she said. After close inspection, obviously steering away from the conversation, she found that they were.

  She ate three of them while Vincenzo put away an entire loaf of bread, three eggs, half a wine skin, and most of the cured ham. She watched with wide eyes as he gorged himself.

  Once finished, Vincenzo hopped up and quickly rolled his bedding. Astrid closed up the firepit and arranged brush over it until it looked like it had never been there.

  “Which way?” Vincenzo asked.

  Astrid cocked her head and gave a crooked smirk. “Well, I was thinking of heading in that direction.” She pointed southwest, away from the toll road.

  “That looks like an animal path, or worse, a bandit trail,” Vincenzo replied. “Why travel that way when there is a lovely road just up that rise?”

  “Because I have no coin and the goat dicks who patrol that road really seem to like coin—and arresting people who don’t have it,” she replied. “Also, I abide by the law. I don’t take things I can’t pay for.”

  “I have coin enough for the both of us,” the large man argued.

  “I’m not asking you to pay my way. Also, since when were we traveling companions?”

  “Since this morning,” Vincenzo said with a bit of gusto, placing fists to hips and sticking out his immense belly.

  He shot her that ridiculously disarming smile he displayed so effectively last night.

  “The Spirit is strong in you,” Astrid said. “I can tell you drink from the deepest part of the Well.”

  “I don’t know what the Well is,” the big man said, “but I accept your views of magic. So, come walk the Toll Road with me. I’ll count the miles very carefully and pay exactly what we owe. We’ll go back the way you came. That leads back out of the Lungu Protectorate.”

  “Is that what this place is called?”

  “Yes,” Vincenzo replied as he threw the heavy bag over his shoulder as if it was filled with feathers. He moved out, surprisingly light on his feet.

  After nearly three years with only animals and trees to talk to, leaving with such a strange person sounded pretty good. He certainly wasn’t boring.

  They climbed back up the bank from the narrow trail. Standing on the wide road again made Astrid feel uneasy.

  “How long have you spent in this Protectorate?” Astrid inquired.

  “I’ve been in Lungu for about a month. I spent several weeks each in the Protectorates of Vasile, Petran, and Ungur.”

  “Those sound like family names,” Astrid observed. “So, the Protectorates are all run by powerful families?”

  “Very good guess,” Vincenzo said as if his student answered a question correctly. “This region was chaotic after it emerged from the Madness. Warrior families protected various regions. The leaders of different areas turned on each other as the remnant became less of a threat.”

  “The Warrior Houses were formed in my land during the madness,” Astrid remarked, recalling her history lessons. “That’s how my people survived the dark time. Magic also came to our lands soon after it ended. But our houses worked together more often than not.”

  “Interesting,” Vinnie remarked. “I’ve traveled far and wide. Everywhere, it’s the same story. Soon after the madness, people start to use magic. In this land, the leaders all practice different forms. They keep their teaching secret and only discuss magical origins among themselves.”
<
br />   “They select certain people, usually children, from villages to train in these arts. It’s a bit different in each protectorate, but once trained, these mages are given authority and instructed to use it in order to ‘secure’ the lands and keep them ‘safe.’”

  Astrid cocked her head. “In my former home, magic brought peace. We didn’t use it to rule over people,” she explained. “But we were at peace so long, we didn’t recognize the threat within until it was too late.”

  Vinnie studied Astrid carefully. The pained look on her face told him not to ask any more questions. Astrid would tell him the rest when she was ready. Instead, he continued to explain what he had learned about the Protectorates.

  “Once they started using magic, all the fighting between Protectorates ended in stalemates. So, they developed a formal system of trade and diplomacy. Now the Protectors are comfortably in charge of well-organized, little collection businesses.”

  “Based on a contribution system, it looks like,” Astrid said. “It was much like this back home… ” she trailed off, looking at her feet before continuing. “The Four Houses were supported by the farms that surrounded them. The Knights and those who fed them were like a huge extended family. The work of either supported both. That’s how we carved out a safe place for people to live after the madness. My grandparents discovered how to draw from the Well and founded the first Warrior House in the region.”

  Vincenzo pretended not to notice her sadness when mentioning her home. That was the best way to get her to keep telling her story.

  Instead, he said, “The Protectorates are very much like you describe. This type of economic system is very common in this region, all the way down to the Great Salt Sea Between.

  “They call it ‘tribute’ here. It’s a form of taxation that appears to pay for the whims of the Protectors more than the common good. I understand from some that it wasn’t always that way. The current protectors seem to squander their wealth. They don’t seem to be building up the region anymore, only their own power.”

  “What about this road?” Astrid countered. “There are no roads this well-kept where I come from.”