Journey To Light: Part I of the High Duties of Pacia

by Bob Craton

CHAPTER 11

  Euclind Eudoxio

  Lucidus was a nice place with sensible people. In other words, it did not resemble Matik at all. Being an Urb-Ordinâre of moderate magnitude, Lucidus was only a fraction the size of the Great City. No part of Lucidus compared in decadent grandeur to Patron’s Hill, but then nothing resembled the deprivation and depravity of Matik’s south-side slums either. The wealthiest Lucidians were comfortable rather than affluent, and its poorest residents had homes and enough to eat and, not coincidentally, refused to squander their money on vices. Even the sad folk who had migrated south over the last decade had found acceptance and were as content as anyone could be after their loss.

  Being practical folk, Lucidians had chosen their Mayóręs in an exceptional manner for as long as anyone could remember. No monarchy, aristocracy, or plutocracy ruled here. Citizens simply hired the best person for the job, and any candidate who failed to perform could be fired at any time by vote of the populace. No one, however, wished to change leaders. Lucidians were still very happy with the leader they had hired twenty-seven years earlier.

  Euclind Eudoxio was that person. He arrived in Lucidus when he was thirty-two and his origins were shrouded in mystery. Although obviously a serious scholar, he said virtually nothing about where he had received his education. His dark skin made it clear that he came from far away, but Lucidians were more open minded than most and he was the most intelligent person to come to Lucidus in a long, long time. People soon relied on him as an advisor, counselor, tutor, and general source of knowledge about any subject. Before long, every Lucidian referred to him as their Wise One. When he was forty, the citizens hired him as their leader and they never had any reason to regret their choice.

  On one particular day, Euclind sat in his office casually reading an old book. A friend, another scholar of equal repute, had given the book as a present some years earlier during good times. It was a novelty, a book about fables and folklore rather than history, which Euclind enjoyed as a hobby rather than a serious subject. The pages contained the purported sayings of a fortune teller known only as the Mystica of the Northland who had lived in the always vague time ‘long, long ago.’ Euclind knew a great deal about the history of the world and had no illusions about the veracity of tales like ‘The Lost Man Meets the Foundling Child,’ ‘The Boy Who Must Be and the Girl of Legend,’ or ‘How the Young Led the Way Home,’ but they did have entertainment value. Suddenly, he noticed something streaking past the glass panes of his window. (Some people believed he had invented the art of glass-making, but others thought possibly he had just brought the idea from elsewhere.)

  “Radbert, are you there?” he called out and a man appeared in the open doorway.

  “Yes I’m here, sir,” said the ordinary looking man who served as a combination scribe and butler. He always left the office door open when his employer was working so he could hear when Euclind asked for something.

  “One of my birds just returned. Would you retrieve its message please?”

  “Of course,” replied Radbert as he left.

  “Don’t forget to feed the bird,” Euclind said after the man was gone, not that Radbert needed reminding. The butler’s assistants paid young boys to catch mice for him, and he fed newly returned messenger birds one, two, or three mice each depending on the length of their journeys. This one earned two mice as a reward for its trip. The Mayórę of Lucidus used no ordinary stone-doves for his deliveries, only kestrels. These small swift falconids could fly faster than any of the competition, and occasionally ate them as well. Euclind also kept a dozen peregrinæ, the kestrels’ larger cousins, which had been trained to attack the ubiquitous blackbirds which flew back and forth across Ostenland from Hibbria to Sarkonia and beyond. The remarkable peregrinæ used their beaks to sever the legs from their prey and then flew back to Lucidus with whatever message capsules the blackbirds had carried.

  “This message is from Anglio,” Radbert said when he returned after a few moments.

  “I’ll read it now,” Euclind said as he accepted the capsule and broke its seal.

  “Would you like some tea, sir?” asked Radbert as he left but Euclind was too lost in his reading to answer. Radbert stepped out of the room and sent an assistant to the kitchen for the teapot anyway.

  Euclind had an avuncular fondness for Hadwin, the young Mayórę of Anglio, and receiving more disturbing news from the man was always unsettling. Being located at the terminus of the Eastway Road, Anglio was the last and most exposed city in the Concordia. South across the Great River lay Hibbria, which had been occupied a generation earlier by an onslaught from the terror-land of Zigor. Most Hibbrians had been good people but the fear of living under the oppression of the Zafiri would affect anyone. Farther north, the rough men of Sarkonia had never been trustworthy and now most of them had been bought and served as mercenaries under Yuzoi officers. The army which had secretly assembled in Terrai Souvage to invade Pàçia twelve years earlier had marched through Sarkonia on its foul way. The fall of Abbelôn and death of Adálar, the last High Protector, had been a tragedy felt everywhere but especially in isolated Anglio, which needed peace more than any other city.

  Mayórę Hadwin had reported earlier that parts of Ostenland north of his city were being infiltrated by tribesmen from the east. Anglion soldiers stayed on alert and the Mayórę now advised that his men had killed several trespassers. The description given in the message did not sound like either Yuzoi or Sarkonians, which meant that some new tribe had arrived from Terrai Souvage. Euclind knew more than anyone about the Yuzoi and their Zafiri masters, and the arrival of a previously unknown group was worrisome.

  This development requires more investigation, Euclind thought to himself, but his first action was to relay the news to those who might help – or perhaps would need help later. He quickly wrote notes to the Mayóręs of Torae and Iteneris and to a nephew of Patron Edric in Matik. The latter owed Euclind favors and had the ear of his uncle, for what it was worth. Calling out to Radbert, Euclind looked up and saw the man already in the room holding a tray with tea and sweetbread.

  “Send these three messages by bird and then dispatch riders to notify the towns along the Fallal to be watchful,” he told Radbert. “I fear the Gray Ones are making some new move.”

  “Right away.”

  Euclind sat and contemplated this latest intelligence. It could only mean that the Zafiri had recruited new reinforcements for their Yuzoi fighters and Sarkonian mercenaries. Nothing good could come from that.

  The next day, Radbert again entered the Mayórę’s office. “Another kestrel has arrived, sir,” Radbert said as he handed a message to Euclind. “This one’s from Iteneris.”

  “Thank you,” the Wise One said as he opened the paper.

  “Good news or bad, sir?” Radbert asked but Euclind’s answer was not straightforward.

  “A kiropteran friend of mine flew all the way from Hinterland to Iteneris specifically to send me this information,” he said, but then he stopped talking and kept reading. Knowing his employer’s ways, Radbert left the room.

  The letter was disorganized and confused. His friend had seen nothing himself and was only forwarding second-hand accounts of wild and strange developments along the eastern border of Hinterland. Several lupuns who had gone hunting in Logou, the sparsely inhabited territory between Hinterland and Hibbria, had not returned and a kiropteran who had flown to look for them was also missing. Most surprising of all was the arrival of two unidentified men who fled from Logou seeking shelter. They were so terrified that they could barely speak. They had seen monsters, they told residents of Hinterland, monsters moving north. A joint posse of lupuns and kiropterans had gone to investigate and found a wide trail with strange tracks, broken trees, and crushed vegetation. Something big and destructive had passed that way.

  Euclind’s friend described the ‘monsters’ in as much detail as the frightened men could give, and he reported that the members of the posse were very nervou
s and confused when they returned. Since kiropterans were sensible persons and lupuns rarely worried about anything, this was troubling news. Euclind stood and looked at a hand-drawn map on the wall. If these so-called monsters were traveling through Logou near the border of Hinterland, where had they started? Did they leave Zigor through Hibbria and then turn west? That was a very roundabout way and did not seem likely. The alternative was that they had crossed the desert straight from Zigor to southern Logou and that thought was troubling.

  “Radbert!” called out Euclind. “Get several kestrels ready. I need to send more messages.”