Bad to the Throne, page 26
part #15 of The Good Guys Series
“You can if you want.”
I let him sit with that thought for a second.
“But then again, the cult would make an even bigger mess, wouldn’t it?” He finally asked.
“They certainly seem pointed in that direction.”
“And given that you survive the seven cycles of the seven strangers—”
“Hey, that wasn’t—”
“—I’m not even sure that stabbing you would do any good. And just in case you’re one of them sensitive sorts, it’s a metaphorical stabbing because you’re also a slayer, so don’t go about trying to kill me because I’m talking about stabbing you. It’s just a thought experiment, all right? I’ll just need a minute, maybe two, maybe twenty. Maybe a few days to process this out.”
“While you’re processing, is there any reason you can think of that someone would want to gain access to this place?”
“Well, I mean, come on. It’s a ruin full of magics, mysteries, and other shit.”
“There’s magic down here? What about riches?”
“Well, supposedly there’s a vault somewhere around here. If you go back to the map room, which we skipped because you were so insistent on getting into the ruins, you’ll see that we’ve really only explored about eight squares of the ruins beyond where we are now.”
“And what have you learned about what you’ve explored?”
“There’s every evidence of a full society and perhaps a nation state. This is a capital city, which makes me think there’s a palace somewhere. And if there’s a palace, there’s a treasure room. And if there’s a treasure room...”
“There’s treasure,” I finished for him.
“Exactly. And if there was a society advanced enough to build all this and advanced enough to do something so powerfully stupid and stupidly powerful as to get it all buried underground, then I’d imagine there’s still some treasure in their treasury. What that would be, I don’t know. Whether or not it would still be useful, I doubt because I don’t see many correlations between us and them. And I think if there was an enchanted item that wasn’t used, it was locked away, it probably would have lost all its enchantment by now. Or not. Maybe it’s grown more powerful. You know what I don’t understand? Magic. You know why? Because it’s not simple. You know what I like?”
“Simple.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, well I don’t think they’re after riches. Because it’s not like, I mean if she became Emperor, she would have access to more riches than just about anyone, but even now, it’s not like the princess is a pauper.”
“Well, it’s not the right question to ask of me. I have no idea.”
“Okay, let’s just assume she’s not looking for valuables. What else might she be looking for?”
“Well, if I had to make a guess, and for the record, you’re forcing me to make a guess. You know, I’m doing this against my better judgment. You keep engaging me in deep thoughts, and I don’t want them.”
“You asked why I was down here!”
“And I don’t like your reasons. But fuck, I’m already in the middle of this mental disaster, something big happened to make this city how it is now and to make the residents of this city what they are now. So my guess is that whatever managed to do that is still somewhere in this city and still in an operational status. Or, rather, it is believed to be thusly. If I was to guess why a princess would be trying to bring her cult into these ruins, it would be to find and use that.”
“Makes sense to me.”
“And yet, there are two distinct issues with that concept: one, I have no idea what I’m really talking about, so it could all be bunk. Two, no one outside of the Underwatch even knows that there was a society that collapsed down here, or that a city was buried and then a whole new society grew on top of it. These ruins are secret. And as far as I can tell, a well-kept one.”
“Well, and I’m just spit-balling here because I also don’t know, but someone could have come here prior to the Underwatch, right? You guys haven’t been around for the entire history of Glaton.”
“That’s true.”
“And so it could be that someone visited, found it, wrote about it and then other people read that book and wanted to come visit the ruins for themselves in search of power and treasure. And after those visitors messed things up, the empire knew it had to do something to keep the ruins secret and safe, and so the he Underwatch was formed to keep the good people out and the bad creatures in. And maybe the rulers then knew the power that was possibly in the ruins and they didn’t know how to deal with it.”
“For the second time today, you fill my head with all sorts of thoughts I never wanted. I would very much like it if you would leave and leave me alone. I’m going to have to think about this for a long time now. So, fuck you and the stairs you came down on. Which are also my stairs, which is a long roundabout way of saying fuck me.”
“I want to find this place before they do.”
“Obvisouly, yes. That makes total sense, and given what you have said, I feel like that is what is in everyone’s best interest. However, now is not the time to do that—”
“Why?”
“Hopefully you’ve been paying attention, so you know that we’re surrounded right now. Given their numbers and how long we’ve been yapping about here, they’ve probably worked up the courage to try and take us down, which means any second now, they’re probably going to jump us and try to eat us. And I’d really rather not be lunch.”
“Because you want to be dinner.”
“Exactly. So why don’t we leave and you can go throw some other poor fool’s entire world view into a tailspin?”
“What if I want to continue exploring?”
“Exploring alone in these ruins is a bad idea. You should wait until you have someone to go with you. And we didn’t bring a map — you’ll need a map to get out of this fucking place. Even me, who’s been walking these ruins for over a decade, need a map. You don’t even have it memorized the way I do.”
“I actually have labyrinthian recall. So as long as I have a roof over my head, I can remember everywhere I go.”
“Well, isn’t that fucking lucky? Fuck me. Twice. Now I feel like shit for multiple reasons. Let’s go. I’m leaving. You can explore if you want — I don’t fucking care anymore.”
“Could you show me the map room, anyway?”
“Hey, fuck off,” he shouted, throwing something into an open window. There was a bright explosion of sorts, sending sparks out up out of the missing roof.
Something screamed and shrieked.
“This way,” he said to me.
And he trudged back the way we’d come.
The explosive device startled the things that were hiding in the ruins around us, enough that whatever attack they may have been prepping, they didn’t make. They did make a lot of noise, but kept themselves hidden.
Bertrand’s actions belied that he knew more about the creatures down here than he was letting on. It seemed to imply that he knew they were trying to put together an ambush of some kind. But then why would he play it off the way he did? There were too many fucking questions here.
Much like Bertrand, I was getting tired of all the complexities.
68
Oddly enough, the map room was the most interesting thing I saw that day. And it wasn’t because of the mapping they’d done. The only portion of the ruins that were well-mapped out was the area about a ten-minute walk from the entrance gate in any direction. Everything past that was just blank.
The real draw to the map room was a three-dimensional map of everything under the surface level of Glaton. There was a table with this sort of glass crystalline structure above it, and inside light glowed to show where all the tunnels and other things that had been dug out were within the walls of Glaton.
“How the hell does this work?” I asked Bertrand.
“Magic.”
“Can you explain any more than that?”
“Not really. A wizard set it up for us. That’s his cave right there.” He pointed to a spot on the map. “It sends out a pulse, roughly every other year, that maps everything underneath the city. And it will show us, pulse by pulse, what has changed, both additions and subtractions from everything beneath. That way, we can know if anybody’s getting close to where the ruins are, and we could potentially find if anybody is trying to dig down there.”
“But it only does it every other year?”
“That’s right.”
“So you can’t tell if somebody’s digging to it today.”
“That’s right. It has its limitations, but it’s a lot better than how I would imagine doing it otherwise, which would be sitting inside the ruins with a bunch of telescopes, hoping to see if someone broke through above. Now, you can see over here that there have been kobold tunnels that have intersected where the ruins are. But we’re not concerned with those at the moment, because kobolds are notoriously… risk averse, I suppose is the polite way to put it. They’ve shown no interest in actually entering the ruins, and it seems clear they found it by accident. Incidentally, that’s how we got the professor — he knew some of those kobolds and got interested in investigating the ruins. And so now he’s working with us and leading the research of the ruins for us.”
“I guess that’s a plus.”
“He seems happy enough.”
“And no one else has come close to finding the ruins?”
“Nope.”
“Not even this wizard guy?”
“Obviously he knows something is here, but he seems content to keep what he knows to himself. And he’s shown no curiosity about it. We’re seriously deep under the city, so it’d be a remarkable undertaking for anybody who isn’t living in the lowest levels of the sewers or pits, ie, the kobolds, to stumble upon these ruins. Or even to dig intentionally to get to them. They’d have to go three times as deep as the sewers to reach anything except the very highest points, and those high points are not exactly spread evenly across. So even if they found a high point, it might not even give them reasonable access to the floor of the cavern, it could very much be that they’ve just found a two hundred foot drop into the darkness that they have no viable means of traversing. Given the depths it would require, we imagine it would take more than two years to reach an actual entrance. Again, imperfect. But I believe this wizard fellow would probably come and give us enough juice to do an emergency pulse if we felt it was warranted.”
“You don’t think the cult’s actions make that warranted?”
“Not yet. If they just started digging, no matter how much they’re digging or how many people they’ve got digging, they won’t be able to make genuine progress without getting noticed above ground. Which is where you’ve already got people looking, right? Because they’d need to be depositing that material somewhere, and it’s not like the city had empty fields to spread dirt across. And they wouldn’t be able to bring in any of the real digger creatures either — not like they could hide a fucking banded worm digging about. Those things are hardly subtle.”
Bertrand used his hand to make a specific gesture on the glass, and suddenly we were flipping back through the pulses, watching how the city had changed over time.
“Twelve years ago, some worms came by. Ah, here they are. These are the tunnels they left. And if you notice, by the next year they’re completely filled in. You know why?”
“Yeah, it’s the worm droppings. They reform as rock.”
“Oh, so you’ve dealt with banded worms before.”
“I have.”
“Well then, if they bring one in, we would know. There would be some sign of it. At least that’s what I think. So I’m more concerned about the other thing you told me in secret than the cult digging and finding that we’re down here.”
“Got it. And this is the most up-to-date paper map you have of the ruins?”
“That’s right.”
“And you don’t have anybody that’s doing explorations now.”
“No, not at present. We are... Well, I wouldn’t say we’re on a skeleton crew, but we are a little short-staffed, being that some of our three hundred plus have been pulled into other parts of the Thirteenth, working the wars. You do know there’s a war going on.”
“I do know. That’s how I got the Imperial Hero badge.”
“Ah, right. Well, good on you. So no, no one has been exploring it for a while. Partially because there doesn’t seem to be much reason for it. Now, if there’s anything else, I would not hesitate to ask us for help. Preferably not me though, because I’m having a bit of an existential crisis, and I think I’m about to drink my dinner and try to forget any of this ever happened. I presume you know the way out, and if you don’t, well, can you ask someone else?”
Before I could say anything, he gave me a sort of half-hearted Imperial salute and walked away.
I stood there for a moment longer, looking over the map, trying to get a sense of what had once been, hoping maybe some pattern would pop out of me.
It didn’t. So I left, making that long, horrible climb all the way back up the stairs, and I could see why these guys only did it once every couple of months.
I was not looking forward to the fact I was going to have to do it again soon.
69
I assumed getting back to Valamir’s was going to be another adventure, but a carriage was waiting for me, so I got a relaxing ride back to where I was staying. I was in bed and asleep right around the time the sun came up.
I went downstairs for breakfast, and got my marching orders for the day.
“Another Senate meeting?” I asked.
“Every day until the session has concluded,” Valamir said. “There are no breaks until an Emperor is chosen. Else it could be drug out in perpetuity.”
“Fine, but is anything going to happen today?”
“I would imagine there is going to be a call to vote.”
“Will there be a vote?”
“Likely, yes.”
“Okay, so…”
“So we will vote.”
“And someone might actually become Emperor today?”
“It is within the realm of probability.”
“Where in that realm?”
“Low.”
“How low?”
“A candidate must achieve a majority, so until that time…”
“Right, right right. I remember.”
“Good. Are you ready?”
“Would it matter if I said no?”
“No.”
“I’m bringing Nimble.”
“Who is that?”
“My earworm friend.”
“It would be better if you did not.”
“He’s going to get bored and cooped up and hungry–”
“Then I can arrange food or even entertainment for him. What would you suggest?”
“Got anyone whose brain you’d like to have eaten?”
“A lengthy list, but I doubt I can make that particular meal happen.”
“Just any reasonably fresh brains, I think.”
“I will arrange it. I’ll be out to the carriage in a moment.”
And he was off, scribbling in his notebook.
Eliza and Amber came into the dining room together, thick as thieves, glancing up and giving me a cursory good morning before resuming their closed conversation.
“Is everything okay here?” I asked.
“What was that?” Eliza asked.
“Everything okay?”
“Mostly, yes.”
“No one needs anything?”
“It would be nice to have more leave to roam about the city. To not be cooped up here.”
“Seconded,” Amber said.
“I bet,” I replied. “The goblins aren’t too much trouble?”
“They’re fine,” Amber told me. “Weird and more than a little rough around the edges, but fine. Is there anything you want me to do with them?”
“What have you been doing with them?”
“Training.”
“Is it working?”
Amber just shrugged, popping half a boiled egg into her mouth.
“No, it’s not not working,” she replied, somehow making the act of spraying her breakfast out of her mouth not disgusting. It was appealing, mind you, but when she did it, it was approaching tolerable. “They’re learning, but it is just slow. It feels like everything I ask them to do is going against their nature as goblins.”
“As long as they’re not hurting anyone else, I guess keep going. Does that mean you can’t do a thing for me today?”
“I would love to do a thing for you, especially if it meant leaving the grounds.”
“Anything?”
“Any.”
Eliza frowned at me.
I moved on.
“I need you to make sure there’s a carriage waiting for me outside the Senate,” I said. “Whenever we’re done there, I need to hurry down to a park for a meeting.”
“I could do that,” Eliza said. “So Amber can continue working with the goblins.”
The brutality of the look Amber shot at Eliza surprised even me. Eliza ignored it, and just sweetly smiled at me.
“You two can fight that out. I don’t want to get involved. But whoever comes, bring the things that I’m not allowed to take into the Senate.”
“Which are?” Eliza asked.
“My weapons. And the magic bag.”
“Got it,” Amber said.
I started to leave, then remembered there was another member of my group.
“What’s Philippe up to?” I asked.
“He’s disappeared into Valamir’s closet,” Eliza said.
“He’s what?”
“He’s organizing all the clothes Valamir has collected, sorting things out and–”
“Threatening to make me go to balls in gowns,” Amber said.
“You would have fun,” Eliza said. “I would die to see you at the Kosternik ball. It is always a grandiose affair, and your presence would cause a season’s worth of rumors and gossip to blossom and swirl.”
