Bad to the Throne, page 39
part #15 of The Good Guys Series
Valamir had the bulk of his private army there in what seemed like minutes, calming most of the situation down. He managed to make sure the non-combatants made it out without injury. Somewhere before midnight, I was back in his mansion, laying in a bathtub with mostly clear water after having changed it a few times.
A note reached me, not via kobold, but via footman.
One word.
Ruins? -C
“Fuck,” I said, throwing the note into the toilet.
“Shall I get you a towel?” the footman asked, gingerly reaching into the toilet to the take the paper note and deposit into the waste receptacle.
“Sorry,” I said.
He just gave me a smile, like he wanted to say, It’s okay. I expect nobles to be shit people.
I was tired. It’d been a long day, and I didn’t want to go.
And yet, maybe Clyde found something. Maybe Clyde realized we needed to take every chance we got to scour the ruins for whatever we could.
I wanted to complain to someone. To have someone else tell me it was okay to rest, that I could take the night off. But with Valamir still out in the midst of the Baeder mess, and everyone else asleep, I didn’t have that. So I grabbed my gear, donned my armor, and headed down to visit the ruins.
100
“I spent the evening with Pomeroy,” Clyde said as I pulled the Underwatch tunic over my armor.
“I’m sorry,” I replied.
“Seems like I got off easy.”
“It wasn’t my favorite ball of the season, that’s for sure.”
“Have you been keeping score?”
“Sure, one out of ten. Seven with rice. Did Pomeroy find anything?”
“He’s convinced he’s got a pattern mapped out. If we go northeast, he thinks we’ll find the center of the city, which is where he figures any place of power will be located.”
“Northeast.”
“Yeah.”
“Weren’t we going that way?”
“We were going more north, north west.”
“Got it. Any idea how far?”
“Based on what we gave him, it’s going to be a bit of a hike.”
“Great.”
“But he’s pretty confident.”
“What about you?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“So?”
“So I’m confident enough to be here instead of up there, helping out.”
“You were ordered to be here and not helping out, weren’t you?”
“Yep. Much as I assume you were.”
“I was told to take the night off.”
“And this is making sure you do,” Bertrand said, coming to stand in the doorway. “I have been given explicit instructions from his royal highness–”
“Just say Valamir,” I said.
Bertrand gave me half a smile, “Valamir wants you both to stay with the Underwatch until he signals the all-clear.”
“Can I just take a nap here?”
“You could.”
“I’m going out looking,” Clyde said.
“Well shit,” I said with a sigh. “I guess I’m going too.”
Bertrand smiled, “I shall happily escort you to the gates.”
Which he did.
What he did not do was go beyond them. He gave us a merry wave and sent us into the darkness.
101
I let Clyde take the lead. He moved fast, like a man on a mission, and seemed to be keeping track of much more than I was. This time, we decided not to walk down the middle of a main street. Instead, we slipped through a few smaller streets until we got to an incredibly narrow street that seemed to make Clyde happy. At that point, we kept to one side, walking in what would have been shade, had there been sun.
A number of times, he stopped and put his hand on my chest to get me to stop, so he could point something out to me. Or so we could wait and let some other nasty creature pass on a side street. Which was odd, because there had been no life but us and the morlocks the time before. What was different tonight?
To double down on the oddities, after the first few minutes, I couldn’t catch a hint of the morlocks. There’d been a few at the start, watching the gates, but either they recognized us and remembered the shellacking we doled out, or there was something else going on. Because as we got deeper into the city, it was clear nothing was tracking us. No one seemed to be waiting to ambush us. We were just out there, moseying along by ourselves.
Clyde had a map he’d drawn, and he’d stop to consult it now and then. Whatever he was looking at on the map seemed to line up with what he saw in reality, because we continued on. Looking over my own map, the one that was being drawn in my head, I could tell that we were a long way from where we started, as well as quite a bit farther east from when we’d taken our original trip through the ruined city.
There were significant differences in the architecture over on this side. The blocks were larger, and while each was usually filled with smaller buildings, or rooms, there were also blocks that seemed to butt up against the foundations of a single massive structure. Some had the remains of staircases carved out of dark stone that led up from the streets to something that was no longer there. But it had to have been something important to be off street level. Like maybe a there had once been a temple, or some other structure of similar significance.
“You want to talk about what happened to keep us down here?” Clyde asked.
“Exploring the ruins, you mean?” I replied.
“I mean, what happened at that ball I couldn’t go to?”
“There was a bit of an incident.”
“Which was?”
“Baeder tried to kill everyone.”
“Katja Baeder?”
I nodded.
“What do you mean by everyone?” Clyde asked. “Like everyone everyone?”
“No, but all the people running for Emperor. And the ones who have votes.”
“So Nadya?”
“She was in the group, yeah.”
Clyde stopped, and he stared at me.
“Seriously?”
“For real.”
“Was she in actual danger?”
“As much as anyone. But, I mean, I was there, so, um…”
Clyde actually took a step back toward the exit before I got my hand on his shoulder.
“There’s nothing you can do now,” I said. “She’s safe. Baeder just got the drop on everyone there.”
He didn’t try to pull away from me — he just stood there.
“Feels like a failure.”
“Maybe, but you shouldn’t feel that way.”
“Easy for you to say. You were there to save the day.”
“And you were here, putting in the work to save the Empire.”
“But why are we here now? Why does–”
“I’m pretty sure I’m here because this shit needs to happen and Valamir wants to keep me from ripping Baeder apart with my bare hands and stuffing what’s left of her into random sewer grates I find around town. You, I don’t know. Probably along the same lines.”
Clyde rubbed his forehead a few times. Then he shook his head. “I don’t like it,” he finally said. “Being stuck down here.”
“Not much more we could be doing up there at the moment,” I said. “Being honest with myself, I know I’d be raging at the fact I couldn’t do a damn thing that matters. The bigwigs are going to be running the show up there, and we’d be up against what they wanted to do. So while I’d rather be sleeping, if I have to be awake, I’d rather have something to do. Which, in this case, is hiking through this weird shit hole with you.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“You’re making me do the bulk of the chatting here, kid.”
“Kid? How old are you?”
“This world or the old?”
“Let’s just walk and not talk, okay?”
“Perfect.”
102
I noticed a stark difference to the ruins around us compared to what we’d seen the previous day. At one time, huge buildings stood witness to the life that had been in the area. But whatever devastation had been wrought came through this area this hardest. There was little more than knee high remains in most places. Some spots even lacked the rubble that seemed ever-present through the ruins. Around the Underwatch gates, there were still some empty doorways and broken windows.
At the edges of my vision, to the left and the right, I caught sight of shapes moving about. Disconcertingly large creatures, but they seemed genuinely disinterested in us. And the complete and utter lack of morlocks continued, with not even the faintest hint of one.
As we continued along the road, I could see something rising above the ruins. At first, it looked as if it might be a part of the cavern floor, some geological oddity that the city had been built around. But as we got closer and the ‘thing’ got in range of my darkvision, I saw it had the regular edges of something manufactured or formed. Something that was immense in size and scale, a singular edifice towering over the ruined cityscape below. Almost as if someone had chosen to build a skyscraper in the middle of the Nevada Test Site, amongst the remains of the fake neighborhoods where the US tested all those lovely hydrogen bombs.
“I don’t want to make any assumptions,” I said, “but…”
Clyde stopped looking over to the left and, instead, followed where I pointed.
“Bit hard to miss,” he replied. “The magic in this place is going nuts, and pointing toward that. And coming from it. Some sort of arcane loop and… I don’t actually know how to describe what I’m seeing in the words I got.”
“You can see magic?”
“Sort of.”
“Neat trick,” I said, continuing on.
“You want to go all the way there?’
“Feels like we need to.”
“But we know where it is.”
“We’ve got a theory. Might as well see if it’s really the place.”
“There’s a lot happening there — it might not be a good idea to get too close.”
“You want to turn back?”
“No, just…” He paused for a few seconds, looking around as if he was reading things in the air. “Are you at all worried about those things over there?”
He pointed to the west, and I saw something moving. Something large enough that its body rose up and over some of the ruins..
“Not especially,” I replied. “They’ve shown no interest in us. I think they’re probably things that hunt morlocks, or eat something that’s not us. They might come and peek at us, but it doesn’t seem like they’re territorial.”
“So we just go on then?”
I nodded, and started walking again. A moment later, Clyde was back by my side.
Within a block or so of the last thing standing, I could almost feel the energy pulsing out of the structure. There was a physical sense to it, like it was just a little bit more effort to move through the air.
The structure itself wasn’t quite the monolith I thought. It looked more like a building up close, something with columns and stairs. It gave us our first look at the aesthetic sensibility of the ruined culture. The pre-morlocks.
Clyde and I continued on quietly, trying to look everywhere at the same time. There was this intense feeling that something bad was about to happen. The vibes were all bad, and I felt gross being there. Going through the arcane miasma.
The ground directly around the building was clear. Leveled by something. Not even the remains of foundations or cobblestone streets. It was smooth rock in most places, with a few spots of what almost looked like volcanic glass.
Clyde pointed at one such spot, eyebrows raised.
I shrugged.
It was a bit weird that neither of us thought to talk, but we remained quiet.
The circular building itself was made out of smooth white stone, something markedly different than anything we’d seen in the rest of the ruins. Or, for that matter, that I’d seen up in Glaton. Not like I was an expert on the building materials of this world, but still.
We started up the stairs. It felt like I should see ripples moving from my feet as I stepped on each tread. The whole world seemed so strange. Fluid almost. But when I touched stone it was firm under my hand. And as I paid attention to that firmness, the weird feelings seemed to dissipate. As if I just needed something to ground myself.
We walked up the stairs, going higher and higher. Clyde tripped a bit, and I caught him before he could fall.
“The treads are off,” I said.
He nodded.
“Morlocks are different sized,” I continued.
He nodded again, and then, without saying anything, he started to walk.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw the distance we’d traveled. Looking up, I saw the cavern ceiling impossibly high above. I felt like there were wisps of something cloud-like there.
Twenty more steps, and we came to an archway, something that was still intact, though the doors it once held were long gone. Stepping through, I saw that we were on the edge of what appeared to be an amphitheater. Staggered stone benches at regular intervals led down to a massive circular stage. The stage had a strange pattern all across it, with a thin spiderweb of black, glittery, glossy something intersecting the entire white stone surface, like an arcane version of that Japanese art of repairing broken pottery. Above us was nothing, until the cavern ceiling, although there was about twenty feet or so more of decorative wall around the whole top level, filled with an abundance of carvings, hieroglyphics, and hundreds of plinths that must have held statues once.
I started down the steps, but Clyde went the other way, to walk around the top level.
I watched as he moved along, but I still wanted a better look at the stage, to see if I could figure out what had happened.
There was a surprising amount of dust on the stairs and the stone; it was weird to see it disturbed by my footprints as I walked along. As much as there had been a gentle perpetual breeze outside this open-air amphitheater, inside, nothing moved. Which was odd. There was no shortage of openings, with several means of ingress to allow whatever the morlocks had once been to come and do whatever it is they did in this place. Which, if I had to guess, probably revolved around something bonkers on the stage.
Close up, the stage was just as weird. First, because it was clean — if there had been direct light on the thing, it would be glossy as fuck. It was as if someone, or something, came to polish it on the regular, getting rid of all the dust. Also, it seemed like it had been a single, solid piece of stone at one point. The vague striations I could see on the edge of the stones matched up perfectly. So something had caused it to break. But not just break — it looked like something had been extruded or forced out of the stone in such a way where the stone had been bent out of the way before being returned to position, just not quite perfectly. And up close, it looked a lot more like there had been molten rock in the repair points. Which seemed like it would have been impossible to handle. At least, without magic.
At the each of the stage, I paused. I had been about to jump up and take a walk, but I held back. It felt like a bad idea, like merely touching the stone would cause some, well, not a trap, but would cause something to happen. What that might be, no idea. Would it be good? I seriously doubted it.
There was not a hint of goodness about this place. Every last detail of the place seemed wrong.
“Seen enough?” I heard Clyde call out.
His voice echoed for a heartbeat in the space, and then stopped, suddenly mid-echo. Like the great sound guy in the sky killed the master volume switch, or shut off all the reverb.
I just nodded, and hurried back up the stairs.
We didn’t quite run away from the place, but we certainly moved at speed. Each of us trying to walk as quickly as possible without breaking into a run. The whole time, at least for me, feeling like something was watching us, getting ready to pounce.
It was a quiet hike back, hours of walking back through the ruins, watching as the ‘city’ grew back up around us. Going from nothing to foundations to walls to some actual buildings still standing. And then, in the distance, the beacon that was the Underwatch gate. Absolutely brilliant and bright amongst the darkness of the cavern.
103
As soon as I got out of the ruins, I got hit with the reality of how long we’d been in there. Bertrand told me the time, which sent me running up the stairs to catch a carriage and race up to the Senate. I managed to get into the building, into my muumuu, and into my chair just in time to not get a demerit.
More than a few of the other Senators stared at me as I sat there. For once, though, it didn’t feel like they were all glaring. Just looking at me with interest, and perhaps a little confusion.
Valamir held up a hand, and the chamberlain nodded. The high prince came over to me and leaned in to speak to me quietly.
“I would ask that you vote with me,” he said. “There are a number of issues the Senate is going to be forced to resolve after the events of last night.”
“We found the spot,” I whispered back.
“In the–”
“Yeah. If we can figure out a way to destroy it, we can have all the time we need to deal with the cult.”
“Amazing. But we need to get through this morning first.”
“Right. So, just vote how you do?”
“If you would.”
“Sure. All twenty?”
“Yes.”
“Done.”
“Thank you.”
Valamir walked back to his seat and sat back down.
“This session of the Seven Hundred and Eighth Seating of the Senate is called to order,” the chamberlain said, smashing her gavel so hard that I was surprised nothing broke. “All business is suspended as there is a resolution brought forth.”
Valamir stood up.
Then Archduke Edgemond stood up.
Then Archduke Lodbrook did the same.
