'Right,' said K'rar to his team when they had all converged in the large room on the top floor, 'get in your gear. It's time for a prison break. By morning there will be a lot of buzz about them, and then the people will remember us asking questions.'
'Then the dogs will begin sniffing for us,' said Shaniz. She had now understood why K'rar hadn't simply visited the prisons and asked to see his men.
'Precisely. Now, my old guard are in the Constabulary's prison, well guarded, but Mershak is farther south in that Unit's jurisdiction. We'll break him out too, but we'll do it in broad daylight tomorrow.'
'Why?'
'The Southern Division Unit uses the inmates for hard labor. Making the bricks for their building projects. They will not expect us, so once we take him, we'll send them a message. They'll start to panic.' He turned to Seth now, 'Seth, do you know where Aldley is?'
'The burial place of our kings, sir? Who doesn't?'
'That's right. Tedros will give you some money. Before dawn the curfew will be over. You'll hire some chaps from the swing with digging materials, and five carts. Wait in the town until we come. Understand?'
'Of course, sir.' The "swing" meant a dependent town outside of the city's limits in the context K'rar had used. Aldley was one of two such towns of Chaldea.
K'rar's knights were ready in less than half an hour, and back in the large room with all the equipment needed. K'rar had both his two swords apart from his climbing equipment, including a mechanical climbing device Tanny the Polemian had designed. The rope was retractable into a box, with a hooked end which a knight could shoot pneumatically at very high speeds so that the hook would perfectly clamp into strong concrete, and pull the knight up. All the knights had trained moderately with this new device, and thus all had this gear. Hazael and about seven others had with them bows, and she also carried a separate bag of poisons, powdered and liquid. Damaris the male carried lots of knives on a belt around his waist.
'The curfew has already started. The streets will be empty, but we best use the roofs. Once we've got them out, we'll sneak them here.'
'But, do you know where exactly they are in the cells?' Romiel asked.
'Yes, I got lucky. We don't have to pretend to visit now. The man I found was with them in the prison. He told me.'
They left the lodges though its windows rather than the door, and kept on the roofs of the buildings a lot longer than on the ground on their way. The ground was teeming with both maroon-shirted Goldorans in Garrera's command and native officers in either the Constabulary green or the army blue. The knights were completely undetected, and at some junctures they flew right over a whole band of soldiers. But something made them stop to watch just before they dropped from the building they were onto one of the wider roads to cross into another division. It was immediately recognizable. A band of marauders.
'Must be the so-called Iron Whippers,' said Suchy, 'everyone seems afraid of them.' They were watching them, at least a dozen of them, demonstrating why. In the middle of the dark, the chaps had pulled out a man from his house, and were making him frog leap from one side of an alley to another, in front of his wife and child. They had blocked each side of the alley, and one of them was following him with a whip as he leapt along the alley, saying,
'You did it to yourself, breadwinner!' he snickered devilishly, and his friends even worse. The man's wife was loudly sobbing instead of him,
'Please stop this, please. My husband was only feeding his family.'
'Quiet, woman. Would you do it in his stead?'
K'rar was furious. Damaris the female whispered to him,
'At your command, Commandant. Let's shoot these sons of bitches.'
'Two of you archers, go to the other end,' he said, pointing to the other end of the alley, 'don't kill them. Just take out their legs. Suchy, that one's yours. We'll hang him naked to that post in the road.'
'Yes sir,' Suchy prepared himself to drop down on the ground. The four archers were quick. They put down eight of the men before anyone saw or heard anything, and then three of the other knights dropped down and disabled the remnants. Suchy slid down the gradient, landing quietly on the ground. The Whipper bully was just looking this way and that in utter bewilderment as his men groaned in pain on the ground. Their victim had remained on the ground, sitting on his buttocks, looking more confused than the others, despite the pain in his legs. Suchy said to the Whipper,
'Your punishment will be worse.' He dropped him in one move. As Tedros and the knight named Jaax joined him, their other comrades dragged back fleeing Whippers and assembled them in the alley. The ones who'd been shot had been knocked out because of the noise they could make. Suchy's prey was protesting on the ground,
'Do you have any idea…?'
'Quiet, fool,' Jaax drove another boot squarely in the chap's face, and K'rar added to it by stepping on the chap's head, pinning it on the earth. He directed the knights to bring him their victim, so Jaax and Hazael lifted up the man from the ground and brought him. His wife and young son came quickly to look at his wounds, as the man said,
'Who are you people?'
'Consider yourself lucky,' said Shaniz to him.
'Lucky? Look, much as I love what you've done, these are Iron Whippers. They'll come back and tear my home down. You should have stayed out of it.'
'That so? They'll come back?' K'rar said. He crouched down to the man under his boot, causing him to groan painfully, 'then we'll give them a reason not to.' K'rar gestured to his men to strip all four men who hadn't been shot. Stark naked, they bound them in ropes and tethered them onto a post in the street, except the leader. For him, K'rar administered a telling punishment. Among their devices of operation they pulled out a horseshoe casting iron. Damaris fitted sharp knives onto it, facing inwards. They then planted the man on a wall in an upright posture, with only his hands bound, and nailed the fetter on the wall around his neck, with the knives only a hairbreadth from his neck. They made sure the man was standing on his toes. If he moved one muscle, the knives would cut his throat. He had to remain on his toes until someone found him. K'rar wrote down a message on a paper the householder gave him, and pinned it next to the man. He then said to the householder,
'When people ask you what happened here, simply tell them, the sea gave up its dead.' He then turned to the little boy aside, and told him, 'there is a large lodging building by the reservoir road, down there. Do you know it?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Good. If the idiots come back at any time, tie this cloth around your head, and stand opposite the inn. One of my men will see you, and he'll tell me. Got it?'
The boy coyly nodded. His mother had also heard these instructions, and considering what they had just done to the bullies, she was very willing to remember them, so she took the son's sash to keep it for him.
The husband, though, was just white with terror, looking at the man on the wall. He'd seen his fair share of the marauder bands and their ruthlessness, but these new people's methods were many more times more appalling. By the time he blinked twice, the Kaffrarian Knights were long gone, and the man on the wall was struggling to keep his neck craned and away from the knives. He began to plead,
'Please…please. Don't let me die here. I wasn't going to kill you, was I?'
But he left him there after spitting on his face.
The task of climbing the Constabulary's walls was the easier one, as they were designed to keep men inside and not out. The knights scaled them quickly, but they approached from the back of the first of three cell buildings, with a castle on top of it taller than the building's flat roof, overlooking the city. They did this because the flat roof's parapets were guarded by a squad of at least eight guards, and if they had climbed directly over the wall and jumped onto the parapet, they would have been spotted. The wall they scaled had nothing behind it but a huge garbage dump of putrefaction, where the filth of the prisons was dumped, including dead animals. It would be emptied occasionally by the inmates in fetters, to transfer the garbage on hand-pulled carts outside the city to a larger filth dump the whole city used. Nonetheless, that side of the wall was unguarded, as nothing of consequence would happen there. A very narrow corridor separated the wall and the building.
K'rar and company needed to deal with the guards on the roof quickly. Two of them were goofing around, three were watching the very large grounds between the cells and the Constabulary headquarters offices, hundreds of meters across. These were grounds for punishment, parades and labor for the inmates. The other three were just pacing this way and that, and one of them was coming too close to the castle behind which K'rar was hiding. Not all 23 knights including K'rar could hide behind the castle, so with finger gesticulations, K'rar assigned the guards to those who were already on the roof with him. They had to be taken out silently lest they raise alarm. K'rar stalked the one pacing close to the watch house, waited for him to turn his back, before grabbing him from behind with a hand over his mouth, and putting him to sleep by squeezing his neck, but without killing him. All those remaining had their backs turned, so seven knights stealthily approached and took them out, although three of them were far off and had to be put down by shooting them. There was no one inside the watchtower. K'rar checked it out, and saw it was actually a lift through which the guards climbed to the roof. He waited for his companions, and dropped first into the interior of the building.
'We're lucky,' he said, 'we can take them through here. Some of you put their uniforms on and stand by the parapet. Damaris, Uche, Romiel, Tedros, come with me. Bekka, Shaniz, back us up. This could drop in a guardroom. Jaax, check. Just look up if there are guards.' Jaax would do this because he was one of those who had taken a guard uniform to disguise himself. His back would be turned to the guards if they were there. The guards wore no helmets, but Jaax's hair was dark brown and wouldn't worry the guards.
When Jaax descended the ladder, some four or more meters, he looked up and slightly nodded. There was no need to look behind him to confirm his findings. It was indeed a guardroom. The four meters of shaft were possibly another floor. K'rar asked him how many guards in sign language, and Jaax replied, "lots." So K'rar said, "go close the door", and Jaax continued to descend the ladder. The other guards obviously ignored him, as he walked away and disappeared from view without incident. K'rar said,
'Bows.' The knights with bows, including Hazael, prepared to drop into the shaft with their devices rather than by ladder. They only had to hear someone asking something about the doors to know that Jaax had locked them up, and then dropped one by one in quick succession, shooting their arrows before they even landed on the ground below. Fifteen knights against nearly thirty men locked up in a large room were fighting moments later, and in the moments after that, all the guards were dead or badly injured. K'rar said,
'At least he didn't hand the prisoners over to Goldorans.'
They had disabled all but three of the shift working in the cells for the night. Another shift would soon arrive, from the Constabulary on the opposite side of the grounds, so K'rar got to work quickly. K'rar's men, he had learned, were respected prisoners, and would be incarcerated in the best cells, but he still had to find out which ones. When he opened the guardroom door, it was directly across a descending flight of stairs leading into the underground cells. To his left was a short corridor with two guards with their backs turned from him, and who didn't look back at him. He sent Shaniz to disable one and bring him the other. Shaniz walked there, and still wasn't minded. But her voice was, when she dropped her hood and said,
'How's the watch gentlemen?'
The guards swiveled around their feet as if something had turned them on an axle. Shaniz allowed them time to confirm she was a lady, and then smacked one's head against the wall while simultaneously disarming the other, with her curved blade to his neck,
'You're welcome to try anything silly, guard,' she said to him. One of his colleagues standing somewhere outside, the last one, saw the limp body of the second guard on the earth, and the spear of the first one on the ground where it had landed with a clunk.
'Hey, what's going on?!' he yelled. Then there was a thud, then a groan, then silence. The female Damaris soon showed up at the door. She had dropped on him from the parapet above. This kill assured the unharmed guard of his fate if he did not heed Shaniz's warning, so he obliged and walked to K'rar, who now dropped his hood, as did the rest. Uche and Romiel were carrying torches they took off the walls in the guardroom although the corridor was well lit. The guard is the one that spoke first, with a sword to his neck,
'Who the fuck are you people?'
'Hey!' Shaniz pinned the man against the wall and tightened the blade's contact with his skin, 'what do you think this is against your neck? A spoon?'
K'rar pulled his face closer to the man's, and nodded to Shaniz to let the man go. K'rar said to him,
'There are three prisoners in this prison. Names are Ederin, Pliny and Ossus. Let's go.' The guard hesitated, so K'rar said, 'don't make me ask twice.'
'You're rebels. Those three men are the king's own prisoners.'
'Precisely,' said Shaniz, 'move!'
The man walked. The steps culminated into a stone hall with large cells on either side of a long corridor. At the end of the corridor were more cells, but there was another narrow pass going left, evidently with more cells. The cells harbored more than eight inmates each, clearly over their capacity, as many of the weaker inmates were sleeping on the ground, while the big bullies slept on the bunkers. Those that were awake saw what was going on, and soon everyone was squeezing themselves on the metal bars to have a look, as the knights and the guard walked past them and into the narrow corridor. In this row, the cells had heavy doors rather than bars and were small, evidently holding only one inmate each. The guard said,
'Here. These three cells.'
Khassius came forward, and intentionally barged the guard away from him. He was good at picking locks, a trade from his former employment on the streets of Xaxanika, and there was no time to simply find the keys to the locks. In a few seconds the door lock clicked, and he snapped the metal door open. He did this for the other two without sliding the doors open. K'rar pulled open the first door. Khassius opened the one he had last cut, and Suchy went for the second one.
K'rar and the man across him sitting on a rather nice bed were both looking at each other in terror. K'rar recognized the man as Mongoose. He was old, at least here in prison. His beard had grown all the way to his chest, and was greying. He was 52 years old now. Obviously it was taking him much longer to agree with what his mind was telling him, because he did instantly recognize the young face looking at him but he thought, as many others who had recognized K'rar, that he was seeing a ghost. K'rar heard Pliny from the neighboring cell say,
'What the bloody hell is this?'
'The king requires your services, soldier,' Suchy said to him.
'Tell the king he can go f…'
'You don't want to be telling me that, Pliny,' said K'rar from where he stood, and he briefly walked to Pliny's cell and looked in, 'on your feet. The land is teeming with Goldorans.'
'No. No, no, no. This is not possible.' Pliny whimpered, but he did get on his feet. Like his other two mates, he was clad in white prison colors. He, too, had overgrown hair and beards, but he was only 35 now, and was more energetic than Mongoose and Ossus. The two had now also walked out of their cells into the corridor, so that Pliny stood directly before K'rar, while Mongoose and Ossus stood to his right and left.
'You lived, Your Majesty?' Mongoose said with a faded voice, 'you lived!'
'And so did you, my friends. So did you. The fight was never over for the three of you. It has only just began. So unless you want to remain…'
Mongoose dropped onto his knee, and the other two followed suit. K'rar said,
'Good choice. Your loyalty is unmatched, my friends. It is also still needed. Let's go get you some nice clothes and food, though. What do you say?'
'Do with us as you like, Your Majesty.'
Now the guard with them was white with terror, as he had now also recognized K'rar. He was standing off from the group with his eyes almost popping out. K'rar said to Khassius,
'Put him in the cell. Hazael, feed him.'
Khassius manhandled the guard and shoved him in Ossus' cell, while Hazael pulled out a wineskin from her logistics and joined him in the cell. She said,
'Drink.'
The man didn't need a lot of clues to know what it was. He began pleading,
'Please. Please don't kill me. I can be of service to the king…'
'Drink the stuff, man!' Hazael yelled. K'rar said to Pliny,
'Make him drink it.'
'Oh, with pleasure, Your Majesty.' Pliny went in with renewed energy, took the wineskin, and pinned the man on the ground.
'Years and years of feeding us sheep guts and insects,' he was swearing, 'now guess who has the last laugh! Drink!'
Mongoose, who was now on his feet, was still looking around trying to make sense of the situation. He said, as the man in the cell tried to gurgle and spit out Hazael's poison,
'Majesty, how is this happening? How did you live? And who are these guys?'
'We'll tell stories later on. Now, we need to go. I'm here in secret, for now. No one knows anything, so do not call me Majesty or by my name among others.' The prisoners in the other cells couldn't have heard a thing as they were quite far, so this instruction was not irrelevant. Pliny was coming out of the cell saying,
'Die, traitor. Die!'
'That won't kill him,' Hazael said to him, 'he just won't be able to speak or move his limbs properly. He'll only gibber and chatter like a madman, so he'll be telling his friends of glad tidings they cannot hear, and if he writes, tidings they cannot read.'
They locked the cell and the other two doors, and departed, but not before releasing 55 inmates, who flooded the grounds with the weapons of the slain guards. They saw nothing of K'rar's party leaving from the roof, as they attacked the front gates to try and make a run for it from there.
They still used the rooftops to return to the large inn, so as to avoid the patrols on the ground. Some of the stronger knights, like Suchy and Romiel, carried the freedmen whenever they needed to, for example through the window of the dinner room they had hired out. As soon as they were settled in, K'rar went on to narrate to them the story, at the end of which, after introducing to them all those with him, he took Shaniz's hand, saying,
'This one is a bit more than a Kaffrarian Knight, gentlemen. She's the princess of Xaxanika, who will become Queen of Korazin.' His other arm was around her waist. The men once more stood up, and each of them kissed her hand. Mongoose was unable to prevent himself from sobbing.
'So,' K'rar said, 'none of us broke our backs, nor died, in vain. But as for you men, your fighting days are over. I will not be leading another guerrilla war. But these knights do not know the lay of the land, yet I might need to deploy them on errands. Will you help them?'
'Majesty,' said Pliny, 'you should not ask your servant whether they want to help. Just give us your commands, and we will execute them.'
'Very well then. Now, I learned that my mother is alive, exiled in Goldora. But there's still Kanga, Lady Esella and Pithadia. You men know what became of them?'
'Kanga is here in the city, sir,' said Mongoose, 'he paid us a visit in prison. He and lady Esella went to Shona many years ago, to get help after you were captured at Mahideen, but only he has returned since.'
'So then, Lady Esella should still be in Shona. Where is Kanga in the city?'
'I do not know exactly, sir,' said Mongoose.
'He told me he's in the wine business,' Pliny said, 'but there's lots of people he could be working for.'
'Rubabel,' said K'rar, 'that's your job. By afternoon tomorrow, I need to know where Kanga is. Jaax, you'll be with him. If you find him, he will have heard of the prison break. Give him a badge, and this address, and tell him to approach discreetly, by night.'
The men for whom these instructions had been issued nodded. K'rar went on,
'Now, it's time for the second part of the mission. The signs we have given them will spook Garrera and his goons. Now, we show the Chaldeans a sign. Garrera's laws allow for a Goldoran who's been mistreated by a native to approach the courts of law for remedy. Because of this, there are many Goldorans who have taken away my people's businesses by lawful decree, like the bakery just across the road. Tomorrow we will be visiting that category of natives. They are already on our side.'
'Will you show yourself to them?' asked Shaniz.
'We'll see. I don't expect them to recognize me without aid. I was just a boy. Now tomorrow night, we'll also leave a mark on one of the Goldoran posts in the city.'
'A mental game, this, sir.'
'That's right, Ossus. Garrera is a military man. He has fought enemies he can see. He can't deal with an enemy he cannot see. He will think it's another lunatic rebel gang, and he'll release his own dogs. Then we'll brand those dogs and send them back, until everything before him stops making sense. Then we will show our hand.'
'Sir, what about the Goldorans?' said Mongoose still, 'they control him.'
'I have been thinking about that. I will deal them invisibly too, but to them we will not give crumbs. For them, I have to make it absolutely clear from the start that their sins will be paid in full blood. They need to know as early as possible that there is no escape, no hope, no forgiveness. Mongoose, as part of this, you'll ride back to the camp with Romiel and Rubabel tomorrow, with instructions I will give you.'
'You honor me, my lord,' Mongoose said.
'Ossus, you and Pliny also cannot be seen in the city. They'll be searching the whole place for you. So you'll also do business from elsewhere. You'll go with Mongoose with your own instructions.'
'Yes sir.'
'Good. The only thing remaining is a new location. This place is not ideal for what we're doing next. You're dismissed.'
The knight Jaax did not immediately go out to look for Kanga, because when he walked onto the street with Rubabel in the morning, the boy from the night before was standing across the street with the band around his head, looking very scared. Jaax said to Rubabel to wait, before he crossed the street and stood over the young boy.
'What happened, sonny?'
'Are you the one who gave me this?' the kid meant the sash on his head.
'Yes. What happened?'
'They are going to flog my father.'
'Flog him?'
'Yes. They want you to show yourself.'
Jaax had to decide between accomplishing the task of finding Kanga, or to go with the kid. He decided on the latter, and beckoned Rubabel across the street.
'Can you not find Kanga yourself?'
'Well, I can't swing swords and shoot arrows like you, but I can do that. What's happening?'
'Something's come up. You go on and hunt Kanga. I'm going with him.'
Rubabel nodded and walked away once Jaax gave him a kerchief, with the colors and emblem of the Kaffrarian Knights, their badge, and also the old emblem of Korazin.
'Remember to say something about his comrades for the king.'
The boy took Jaax to the location quickly because he knew the alleys and backways and shortcuts, and when they came to the block where he lived, they came through the side away from the road. Jaax saw there was still a commotion in the neighborhood. The Whippers had ransacked the child's house and thrown, but not burned or taken, everything outside. The man they had left on the wall hadn't been able to remain on his toes, and had sustained severe lacerations that killed him. So another clique of his colleagues had made another call to the home of the man. There was a crowd of spectators in the road surrounding the scene where three Whippers, brandishing whips, had put the man on his knees, with his wife being forced to watch by another one. Their colleagues were standing along the edge of the crowd with their whips too. Jaax, wearing his hood, pushed through the crowd to get a good look. Apart from a couple of uniformed constables, there were at least a dozen Whippers again, three of them on horses, including one of those in the center. He was announcing,
'Show yourself, savior! Come out and save him again!'
Jaax could see the man had already taken punishment from the whip. He angrily scolded the constable just standing there in the crowd,
'Hey, why are you just watching them do that?'
The officer threw Jaax's hand off his shoulder, but he was calm when he said,
'Why don't you go save him, if you're so concerned?'
Now Jaax was already considering this option, but there were twelve men and some constables. He could take them, but he wasn't cocky. He was in Shaniz's Serpentine Division, and wasn't inclined to use force from the start. So Jaax endured the beating they gave the man along with the man's wife and their son, and then tailed the clique once they were finished. But then all of them had horses, and had simply stabled them somewhere. So Jaax had to climb to the rooftops to catch up. They went a long ways north, went behind and past the constabulary building, and soon appeared to be headed to the narrow gate on the north wall that the knights had used to get into the city. They did not go to the gate though. They instead detoured to a large home built on top of a narrow river. Jaax immediately recognized this rivulet. K'rar had mentioned a house built over the tunnel that had saved his life when he and eighteen men escaped through it. Jaax had not been with the Commandant when he had checked it out, but Jaax had paid attention when K'rar had said that the tunnel from the palace led here. It was the Abishec rivulet, Jaax remembered. It was easily recognizable because of the waterfall Jaax was looking at, above which the home's perimeter wall had been raised, so the river flowed through the home's compound.
'No kidding,' Jaax said. He then turned away and made a beeline for Aldley monastery and cemetery.
General Garrera was not impressed when the Principal Superintendent of the Constabulary showed up early midmorning at the palace. Not because he didn't like the man, but because he already knew why he was here. When the Chief Constable, known simply as Duda, walked into the throne room, the king was already giving an audience to three others including the Minister for Goldoran Affairs, the trade minister Ishkeniaz, and Lankh. Lankh had no official position. He was simply the king's man, his lap dog, especially in the king's affairs and matters of state that involved the use of force, intimidation and other underhanded tactics. Lankh was only too happy to take his master's blame, for example for the Iron Whippers, who were undeniably state-sponsored.
Duda had stormed into the throne room by pushing aside the guards at the entrance, whom Garrera had ordered not to let anyone in. For this reason Lankh rebuked him, saying,
'This is the king's throne room. If the king says he doesn't want anyone inside, he doesn't want anyone inside.'
'This is urgent, Lankh. Last night's altercation wasn't merely a bloody prison break.'
'What are you saying?' Lankh said.
'This is not a Constabulary office, Duda,' Garrera said harshly, 'I cannot be disturbed with petty matters such as that. Deal with it.'
'Your Majesty,' Duda was insistent, 'we were wrong to think the inmates killed all those men. The killers were not inmates. They came from outside. And their objective was to break out the civil war criminals, not to cause a riot as we thought.'
'The civil war criminals?' now this wasn't a petty issue. Garrera paid attention to that, 'are you saying that the boy king's men are not in the prison?'
'I am afraid that is the case. The prisons were locked this morning, so we thought the prisoners were still undisturbed. We only just found out. Please, Your Majesty, accept my apologies.'
'You only found out what, Duda? That the prisoners were not in the locked cells?'
'Yes, Your Majesty. They were broken out by an external group. They picked the locks, and then reinstalled them once they took the prisoners. We now believe they are the ones who killed the guards. That explains the arrows we found. The guards do not use bows.'
'Why did you not bother to check inside the cells?' Lankh almost shouted.
'We heard movement inside one of them, sir. So we thought the prisoners were inside.'
'But?'
'It was one of our officers. He saw them. They left him alive.'
'Where is this officer? Bring him here immediately,' Lankh ordered.
'I did, my lord. I thought you might want to take a look yourself. But he cannot speak. He seems to have been fed a potent poison that took his speech, so he just gibbers and points. He cannot speak or walk by himself, sir.'
Garrera and all those with him shared looks. He said,
'Bring him in.'
The superintendent looked back at the guards, who opened the door to let in three other prison wardens, dragging the limp body of a madman, their fellow officer. Even before they dragged him closer like a sack, Duda's description of him began to look profoundly euphemistic. Whereas he couldn't move or speak, these things were the least of the man's problems. The man's eyes were bloodshot and teary, his mouth frothing violently, and his nose running with clear mucus. His whole face was wet. He seemed to be able to move his upper limbs slightly, but his lower limbs were lifeless. He was difficult to drag, as he was resistant and strong even though only half of his nerves were functional. The Goldoran minister and the Trade Minister cringed from him instantly when they brought him close. The man was suffering from what seemed to be a demonic, painful infection. His hands were incessantly palpitating, and when they dropped him on the ground, he could sit, but his head was downcast. At intermittent intervals the man let out gibberish speech like a great ape. He was very frightening, even for Garrera. The Goldoran minister, Sentien, was especially shocked. He muttered, with a shit-scared face,
'What the hell is wrong with him?'
'Whoever took the prisoners did this to him,' said Duda, 'and I think they did this intentionally.'
Before any reply was made, the throne room main door was pushed open, and Kishra, flanked and followed by two maids and two guards, came rushing in. She was obviously was here on account of the sick man, as she immediately said aloud,
'That man might be infectious, and you brought him in before the king! Take him out immediately!'
The prison men rushed to do so, but Garrera said,
'Take him to the palace infirmary. Have the apothecaries examine him.'
Once they did so, Duda said,
'Your Majesty, whoever the breakers are, they didn't even use the gates. They went over the walls.'
'What?' Lankh said.
'They did. There is no other reasonable conclusion. We are facing a dangerous band of criminals, sir. Trained, dangerous and obviously provoking Your Majesty.'
'Why do you believe so?' Garrera asked.
'They killed 40 men, sir. The whole night shift. The only survivor was the man you just saw. And that is not all. This morning I also received a report that eight of your men, lord Lankh, were injured, and one was killed in one of the cruelest methods I have ever seen.' Duda was referring to the Whipper they had impaled with his neck on the wall, 'they found your men bullying a citizen, and intervened, then went on with their original mission at the prison.'
'Lankh, take care of that and report to me immediately. Find the prisoners at all costs,' came Garrera's orders. Lankh bowed, beckoned Duda with his head. As they walked down the hall, Duda said,
'One more thing Your Majesty. Just moments ago, they slayed twenty more men at the stone quarry down south. They took Constable Mershak.'
'So what you're saying is they're announcing their allegiance to the Casparon boy?' said Garrera. This was a cause not just for consternation but also confusion. The problem of the dead king had been concluded almost a decade ago. It was a thing of the past, a wound the kingdom would have already healed from.
'Rebels. The Black Hands,' Lankh said, 'why are they resurfacing at this time?'
'I don't think so, lord Lankh. Whoever these guys are, they aren't a bunch of cowardly guerillas. These guys are serious business.'
'And that, my friend, is my prerequisite.' Lankh boasted.
'Well go find them!' Kishra commanded, 'They must not for any reason disrupt the festival. Understand? I think this is their intention.'
Garrera was left alone once more with the two ministers once Kishra also left the hall. He resumed the conversation they had been having, involving the citizens whom minister Sentien represented.
'Now, as I was saying, your threats help neither me nor your nation. The Goldorans in the city repatriate lots of money to your king. I will heed the minister's advice and remove the tax cuts.' The minister he meant was Ishkeniaz.
'For the continued good relations between our nations, I do not think this…'
'If anyone of your compatriots feel dissatisfied, send them back home,' Garrera snapped, 'I have mollycoddled you and your people too long.'
'Please, Minister Sentien,' said Ishkeniaz, 'you need to understand that there are more than 20,000 Goldoran workers in this country, and more will be coming, and they are here to stay. The economy cannot survive if all those people are not paying back the economy that feeds them. This is a nation, minister, not the Goldoran government's treasure chest.' He slightly emphasized these last words.
'The economy will recover. You are only saying this because the war has depleted your coffers.'
'I am the Minister of Trade, Sentien. I don't appreciate a lecture me about these matters from you, of all people.'
'His Highness Deng-Dau made clear the terrible consequences of this course of action, Your Majesty, on his last visit.'
Garrera arose from his seat.
'Minister Ishkeniaz, please draft the tax plan for Goldoran workers in Chaldea and the Reideland. Chief Administrator Maldab will help you draft the subsequent statute.'
Garrera walked out of the room from behind his throne, and, after shooting Sentien a triumphant look, Ishkeniaz left him standing there too, taking the opposite direction. Sentien bit his lip, exhaled his discontent and followed him moments later. As soon as he stepped out onto the steps outside, his aide, who was also one of his three Goldoran guards, immediately accosted him. Sentien said to him as they walked away across the paved compound,
'How goes it?'
'We have 250,000 kori worth of counterfeit. At your command we will…'
'Go ahead. Circulate it tonight. The king is getting comfortable again.'
'Very well, sir.'
Meanwhile K'rar and company were all outside Chaldea, but less than a few miles northwest. There, with a convoy of more than thirty horse-drawn carts that they had driven out of the city in the most inconspicuous of manners, they traversed the King Gloskan Valley, named after Korazin's third king. Whereas the wetland's periphery teemed with human activity, from fishermen to bamboo lumbers, the interior was an eerie, isolated valley into which Chaldea's main river regurgitated its waters. Surrounded by a mangrove forest and some bamboo here and there, the knights had to navigate it with some difficulty, sometimes even having to measure the depth of wet ground to gauge whether it was crossable. K'rar was in the vanguard of this expedition, but was using only his memory to lead it. There was a map, but there was no way K'rar was going to retrieve it from the archive of the Ashtoreth temple inside the palace grounds. But K'rar trusted his memory from more than a decade ago. He and his father, on a hunting trip, had come down to the valley. They had not ventured this deep, but that one visit had encouraged his father to tell him in confidence the details of the location of his secret fund. The king had at that time spoken to him about this in the manner of simply making conversation with a ten-year-old, but K'rar remembered it vividly, since the old man had resurrected this subject on his deathbed. The cache, his father had said, was toward the north edge of the swamp, but to get to it one had to approach from the south, within the wetland, and not from the north. To aid in this was a riddle that his father had concocted himself, and while K'rar navigated the swamp, he was muttering it to himself, then giving instructions.
'We're looking for a patch of dry ground that looks out of place in a swamp,' he was saying.
'You mean, like a rock system in a swamp?' said Suchy.
'Yeah, something like that. It must be easily evident.'
'K'rar, have you seen this place before?' asked Bekka.
'Not even a little bit,' said K'rar.
But there was no need to debate the matter any longer because Jaax suddenly cried,
'Look, over there! The swamp is not growing there.'
There was indeed a sort of a glade, which he had seen through the crevices of bamboo.
'Hard ground,' said Bekka, 'and we're at the edge of the swamp.'
'Yeah,' said Shaniz, 'the question is, how to get there.'
They were separated from the opening by the same bamboo stretch, where their horses would certainly be unable to cross. But the unit were not civilian treasure hunters, and within minutes were busy cutting through the bamboo wall, wading through several feet of water from the waist down. Those at the rear collected all of the bamboo sticks, and by the time they came out the other side, had cut down enough to make an improvised raft. The two Damaris namesakes immediately launched this endeavor. Only two knights had remained behind with the convoy of carts, so eighteen knights began to examine the landscape that they were now standing on.
'Well this is definitely out of place,' said Hazael. They were looking at just what Bekka had imagined, a cave formation, elevated higher than the peat bog around it.
'It's like the hiding place of some swamp creature that snatches boys,' joked Toivonen.
'Really, Toivonen? Caudan fantasy tales at your age?' someone said.
'Okay, focus. According to my father, the main rock has two cheeks, separated by a narrow line at the top. Let's climb.'
From the low altitude where they stood, only one gargantuan boulder at the foot of which they stood, was visible. But the climb was relatively easy for them. The rock was not very high, nor was it smooth so as to render it too precarious. They were soon at the summit, and once more stood there to examine the strangeness of the rock. It was as though someone had sliced off the top of the boulder, creating a flat table, totally barren.
'Reminds me of the Urdian rock,' Hazael said, recalling to mind the island rock where K'rar had recruited his Urdian eagles. Only a few of them, those who had been on the Iscalan that time, understood what she was saying.
The unit treaded the flat top until they found the crevasse close to its east end, and confirming that they had indeed come to the right place. The crevasse was deep and long, cutting almost completely across the rock.
'The secret fund is in this crevasse,' K'rar declared, 'we just need to find it.'
They had planned for all the possible contingencies, so they had all the equipment they needed to climb down into the fracture.
It was Toivonen who spotted a large hole somewhere on the west cheek of the crevasse, near the top rather than the base. The knights had scanned the whole length at the bottom for half an hour, where putrid, rotten water could have caused them some severe stomachaches, and found nothing. So when Toivonen yelled about an opening, the group had started to feel downcast, having wasted their time. Now they were overtaken by an uprush of excitement. They returned to the top of the rock, so as to climb down again into the hole. K'rar's face was beaming in the dark when he said,
'This is it. This is the place. There, at the other end.'
For some reason K'rar was able to make out what appeared to be a rolling stone of a tomb, while his friends could not. They had to light torches and get closer to see it.
The stone was at first rigid, but the knights united to dislodge it from the entrance successfully. And out came a new offensive smell, causing them all to cringe from the hole with crumbled faces and with their fingers held over their nostrils.
'It's an actual tomb, urgh!' cursed Uche, casting another look inside with the aid of his torch. The rest of them acclimated to the nasty smell, and also peeked inside to view one of the most gruesome sights any of them had ever seen. Dry bones, the remains of both dead people and animals, laid out like a carpet. The smell had been imprisoned inside the tomb for what could have easily been a couple of decades, and had accumulated there, as if consciously, waiting for someone to push open the rolling stone. Indeed, the smell dissipated into the air and escaped outside, leaving behind by no means a sweet fragrance, but a milder version of itself. Five knights including K'rar went deeper, and at long last, discovered the fortune after which they were after. K'rar's companions began cackling like witches, signaling to their comrades outside the obvious thing.
An entire room carved out of the rock, whether by natural means or human hands, full of wooden crates in which were pure gold bars, trinkets, rings, diadems and the like. The party remained in there for several minutes, trying to make sense of the find, until K'rar put an end to the daydream,
'Let's transfer it then, all of it.'
The endeavor took a whole nine hours to conclude from start to finish, when the convoy was back with their horses traveling to Chaldea's walls. But K'rar had them wait for nightfall to avoid drawing attention from the large numbers of people, and constables and soldiers who would be active in daytime.