Asunder
indeterminate and disordered movements for two players, one offstage
Mithrigil Galtirglin
II. The Greilands
"And you are?"
"My name is Gabranth, sir. I'm looking for work, sir."
"You were with the military."
"Yes, sir."
"You can stop calling me sir. Never have I been with the military."
"Of course, s—yes, milord."
The old man smiled and folded his hands into the long sleeves of his robes. "Better, better." Shaking them out of his sleeves, he then laid his hands on his desk, which was piled high with yellowing papers and crystals and all manner of things, and peered at the vagrant standing in his doorway. The youth stood quite tall, almost regal, and though he was a bit haggard he had a strong frame, supporting his assertion that he'd served. "Whereabout do you come from?"
"The capital, s—milord, but I was stationed at Ronsenburg this last year." The youth rolled a shoulder against his cheek, which was spread with an unkempt and wiry beard almost the same fair shade as his hair, which was probably actually blonde when it was clean. He kept his hands at his sides—he had a sword on his hip, the scabbard of good make—and eyes forward, and these were rather bright, a dark brown-grey like a horse's hoof before being shod.
"And how old are you?"
"Nineteen, milord."
Nodding in approval, the old man sat down at his desk and ruffled about for papers, more to buy time to decide than anything else. "What sort of experience have you? I've precious little need of soldiers at the moment, the Empire being how it is—were you pursuant before you enlisted?"
The youth—Gabranth—did not gesture, but simply replied, "No. I am literate, but was never apprenticed."
"Such cannot be helped." The old man had expected as much, and would not like have made use of such a trade anyway, but it was worth asking. "Worry not, there is work enough for a pair of soldier's arms on a manor this size. Jan!" he called out the door, prying a pen out of a cup on his desk at the same time.
A dark-haired and sallow man stepped up behind Gabranth in the doorway, "Yes, milord?"
"Send for Walther, tell him I've got a stray for him to train. You'll be mining silt near the river," the old man clarified to the now slightly-relieved looking Gabranth, who continued to stand at attention before the lord's desk. "It involves a bit of heavy machinery, but you'll catch on."
"Thank you, milord," Gabranth said, hesitating forward as if unsure whether he should bow.
The old man understood the gesture and smiled warmly, scrawling the young man's name in his datebook to give to the clerks later. "Yes, I was titled, before the war. You seem like the type to take that into account." When the youth cracked a reticent smile, the old man went on, "Earl Franz Byron, of the Greilands. Not that it matters, things being how they are…"
-
I. Ronsenburg
Two years since their father, Johannes, was dead, and five times Ronsenburg had been reclaimed, and six times fallen.
The screams of the dying were crushed under a redoubled wailing of the Archadian smallcrafts and their guns. Shrapnel and stone fell about the fleeing Landisern as the citadel's walls, rebuilt so many times in these last months, gave way to the Archadian onslaught. The soldiers—all of them soldiers, for Ronsenburg had ceased to be anything but a fortress—still clutched their weapons in sweat-soaked hands or blood-slick gauntlets, only fear of death or imprisonment spurring them on toward another exile, another loss.
Hand-in-hand the twins bolted across the rubble that had once been their courtyard, their home. Basch clung like a vice to the hilt of a common sword in his right, his own long since splintered on the helm of an Archadian lower judge; Noah, half-dragging his brother with his right hand, still had the sword their father had given him, and held it now in his faster hand, his left.
They scrambled into the cover of a fallen smallcraft, still sparking and leaking Mist from its exposed innards. The clouds and smoke overhead cast the shadows blue and chilled the body of the craft. Noah leant his back against it, and Basch seethed in the direction of the fortress, the hiss of spittle and sweat between his teeth ringing through Noah's ears.
"'Tis the end," Basch barely mouthed.
"Aye," Noah agreed, closing his eyes.
Above and before them, another ton of new stone fell from the bastion, interrupting the grunts and the clamoring of armored feet. Noah's eyes opened wearily and he felt them crunch against the blood spattered on his face, half-dry.
Neither twin would be the one to admit it; there was nowhere left for them to go, no chance to retake their home a sixth time, no more Republic of Landis. They voiced it not; they stood in the shadow of their rising enemy, palms together, fingers intertwined, and knew that they had truly failed.
Noah tried to drown out the last throes of the battle, and listened to himself and his twin breathe, unevenly, unpredictably. Their voices had settled in these last two years, and Basch's had broken lower, though neither youth sounded like a child any more.
Congealed blood and muck ran down Noah's wrist into the spaces between his and Basch's splayed fingers. Noah twitched, and the ichor leaked between their palms, and made a quiet, protesting squelch when they reset their grip.
A few more soldiers scuttled across the courtyard, not pursued, but these dispersed and disappeared. Basch sighed, and his voice rattled heavily with it. "We must go. To the capital. Perhaps."
Noah shook his head, barely, and his tattered armor scraped against the side of their cover. "I chanced on one of their transmissions," he whispered. "Things fare well for them…in the West…"
Basch's fingers shuddered, just slightly, and his elbow nocked. "Then to Nalbina. Toget—" he began to say, then cut his own words off with a choked half-growl. His shoulders sank, and again neither twin would be the one to admit it.
There was no haven for them, not together. Since their father had fallen, the twins had taken up his mantle and, always as a pair, kept Ronsenburg contested. Five times, they had smoked the Archadians out, five times they had begun to reinforce the walls. They had stolen munitions and exposed secrets; they had felled airships and destroyed carriers; they had killed a Judge Magister, though neither knew which it had been; they, though, ever they. They were known to the enemy as Ronsenburg's twins, and that was their greatest liability.
But damned if either would actually say the words, here we must part.
Noah let the unspoken pass between them as another smallcraft, one of their own, fell out of the storm-grey sky. He glanced sidelong at Basch, whose two days of fair beard were streaked with blood and oil, and so dark that it might have been their father's. Noah suspected he looked much the same. They could easily pass for not-themselves, at least alone. And Noah knew that Basch would accept the idea, if Noah raised it—
"Not forever" Basch said hoarsely. "Time enough for them to stay their hounds."
—and Noah smiled, despite himself, despite the world that was ending around them.
Almost forgetting that he still held a sword with it, Noah wrapped his free arm around his brother's neck and pulled him close, and forced an insistent, blood-caked kiss to Basch's forehead. Basch sighed and closed his eyes, resigned, and returned his twin's hold, his breath sullen and leaden on Noah's neck.
"One year," Noah asserted, lips right against his brother's skin.
"The Colonnade at Nabudis," Basch confirmed, as if the countersign to a password, clasping Noah's hand tightly in his own.
A pair of Archadian crafts wheeled overhead, their klaxons and searchlights burning past the twins' weary eyelids. The young men pried themselves apart with a jolt and darted off in opposite directions, only looking back once, a hundred strides already between them.
-
IV. East
Only three things could have gone wrong.
So Noah kept telling himself, every other step with the setting sun at his back. Only three things. Three things. And two of them were absolutely preposterous.
Noah tripped over a stone by the roadside and nearly dropped his satchel. He paused, and realized his breath was heavy—perhaps he'd been going about this too angrily.
No. He had every right to be in a twist.
Straightening himself and setting off again at a notably slower pace, Noah shouldered the satchel anew and tried to clear his head.
Only three things could have gone wrong, he repeated to himself. The first and most obvious was that Basch forgot.
Damned if he could forget.
Noah quickly dodged a particularly sharp bramble and glanced back at it, perhaps a bit dizzy.
The second and next most obvious was that Basch was dead.
Noah thought that more preposterous than the first. He would know, would he not, if his twin was no longer in this mortal coil? Besides, he did not want to believe it.
A chill wind clipped across the desert and Noah pulled up his cowl, the stout hairs of his beard raking against the ragged cloth. He set his shoulder toward the gale and set about deconstructing the final option.
-
III. Nabudis
Perhaps the foreigner thought he was being discreet. For four days now he had perched astride the Colonnade, his face half-hidden by a deep grey cowl and the thick book he carried. His long legs dangled down half a flight of stairs as he lay, sprawled in the shade of a pillar. His clothing was for warmth and emphatically northern, with full leather gloves and a knit ivory shirt with long sleeves, like an old man's. He had opened the front of the shirt in concession to the Nalbina heat, and his brown pants were hiked up to just below his knees. His sandals were hale but frayed, perhaps a week too old. By the edges of his beard and the fair hair on his shins, he was past a score old, though how far past the maid could not guess. She had not dared come close enough to see his eyes.
The maid had taken a bit of interest in him, for he was something truly different.
The first day, he had waited anxiously, half-approaching a few passerby, then turning aside when they turned out not to be what he sought. The second day, he conveyed even more anxiousness, and more false-starts, and more dejection when he stood unfulfilled. The third day, he had brought the book, but had not opened it; like the sword on his right hip and the small pouch of food he had set beside himself the first two days, the book remained untouched beside him.
The fourth day, today, he at least pretended to read.
Pausing in her scrubbing of the inn's steps, she glanced over at the foreigner again. He was peering over the rim of his book, scanning the streets with the same urgency that had permeated his every move. He had in the subtle turn of his head more passion than a serenader at the window of a maiden—and it wasn't romantic, or at least it didn't seem so to the inn-maid. He had lost something, and was told he could find it again, but this was his fourth day of vigil and whoever he sought had not surfaced. No woman would stand up someone that earnest for so long.
There was an element of tragedy to him, she thought, and wrung out her dirty rag into its bucket. Perhaps she would ask after his errand tomorrow.
-
IV'. Further East
"Really?" the young blond man asked, feigning naïveté and leaning slightly forward. His voice sounded higher to him, but that had always been effective, so he kept the affectation. "They fled here after the second fall?"
"That they did," the hunter said, thumbing the rim of his tankard with jaunty unease, like a man watching a public execution. "And the second fall was the most spectacular save the last one, from what I saw. Not many of them Ronsenburgern made it this far, but for the next couple of months they gathered the militia here n' then boom, retook the town."
"Was that the one where they really smoked the Archadians out?"
"No no no, that was after the third. I think." The hunter—a large, roundish red Bangaa with a snuffbox hat and only three and a half ears—glanced over his shoulder to make sure the Archadian soldiers on the other side of the tavern were otherwise occupied. "The second time them twins retook Ronsenburg was the time they killed Ferinas."
Oh, Noah thought, so that had been the man beneath the helmet… "Ferinas? As in Judge Magister Ferinas?" Noah tried to whisper, glancing pointedly over at the capernoited Archadians and leaning over his half-finished plate of food toward he hunter.
"One n' the same," the hunter drawled with no small infusion of pride. "Story goes them twins infiltrated the fortress from the underside up, walked right up a secret passage into Senator Johannes' old bedroom n' fought the Judge right then n' there."
The young man let out an awed hiss, and privately shuddered with gratification that the tale had circulated. "And then what?"
"Well, one of them put on the Judge's armor n' turned the fortress upside-down while the other went back down the passage, led the charge from the outside. Genius, I tell you, n' it worked like a charm. My brother, he was in the charge, said them Archadians folded like a pair of rabbit ears."
Noah laughed, then hushed himself and twitched warily in the direction of the Archadians' table. "Where are the twins?" he whispered at the hunter. "Is there going to be a sixth rebuttal?"
The Bangaa shook his head, his long snout curving downward in a frown. "I think not, 'tis been so long. Last I heard the Judges were still hunting the twins, actually." A dark thought seemed to occur to the Bangaa then, and he peered warily at the young man across from him. "You're not one of them, are you—one of them Judges?"
Noah allowed himself a barely-audible but blatantly obvious snigger.
"Just messing with you, lad," the Hunter assured him with a smile. "Besides, wouldn't do them good to come back. A year n' half's too long to stay away," he added, and went back to thumbing his tankard, absently.
"Gods above, I wish I could have been there," the youth said, hanging his head and clenching a fist, pulsed once against the table in exasperation.
"You're not the only one who did," the hunter assured him, "but I don't think it would have made much difference."
-
III'. Nabudis, Recapitulated
"But wasn't there a Hume man here?" the inn-maid asked the sentry. "A foreigner, young, with fair hair and a beard?"
The sentry considered it a moment, flipping his double-ears over his shoulder and scratching his chin with a long, curved nail. "Come t'think of it, a'did see the type yer after. Sword, scarf, lookin' like a dog lost 'is master?"
"I guess," the maid said, pouting. "He did seem rather lost."
"Me boys spied 'im takin' 'is leave this mornin', good 'n early. Took off north, same way 'e came in."
The inn-maid shrugged, and had already turned back toward her workplace without a second thought. "It matters little. Thanks, Ba'gamnan."
-
V. Ronsenburg, Recapitulated
"Do please repeat that."
They stood in the deep black shadow of a statue of Judge Magister Ferinas that now dominated the central courtyard. It was twenty feet high from greave to helm and fashioned of a bluish-grey stone, possibly treated, and every chink of armor was intricately carved. The statue rose from a black pedestal that came up to Noah's waist, carved with five hundred trite words to describe a martyr and rub salt in old wounds. The sun had eked past noon and into one, but had sunk to the south for the summer and the statue's cast reached almost to the fortress' walls.
"Dalmasca," the dark-haired, shifty-eyed boy obliged. "He's serving the King of Dalmasca. 'S what I heard."
A sharp heat flared into Noah's temples. "And the other?"
"Couldn't say," the boy said with an almost jaunty shrug. "Could ask, though."
"You could do me one better," Noah offered, kneeling to the boy's level with an elbow across his knee and looking the child straight in the eyes. "Where do you hear these things?"
The boy chirruped proudly, "I serve the Judges at mess. They forget I'm there, a'times."
"That's unwise of them," Noah said with a slight smile, trying to force the building rage inside him down.
"Isn't it?" the boy asked rhetorically with a gap-toothed grin. "'Cept for my father, the Judges have all the best secrets."
"Aye," Noah said. His heart was beginning to race and his vision to cloud, and he quickly shook his head side to side, almost a shiver. "I've another favor to ask of you," he told the child, and a thin tremor escaped into his voice.
"What is it?"
"Do you know the secret places in here too?"
"You bet!"
"Is there anything like a graveyard? Or a large tomb?"
The boy didn't even have to think before answering mischievously, "There's a big grey tomb in one of the little courtyards where only the Judges can go. I mean, I can go too, but only 'cause I know the way around. Don't think you'd fit that way though, you're too big."
"I am," Noah agreed, "aren't I." Still kneeling, Noah unclasped his sword-belt and offered the sword, scabbard, and belt to the boy. "I need you to follow these instructions to the letter."
The boy, a bit shocked, nodded slowly and once.
"Under cover of night, when no Judges are about, take this to the courtyard. I want you to take the sword out of the scabbard and plant it upright, right in front of the tomb. On the right side, if the ground in the center is too hard. Got that?"
Again the boy nodded, quicker and eager this time.
Noah's hands were shaking. "After…after that, you can keep the scabbard and the belt, or sell them, or whatever you please. Then tomorrow morning—I'll know if you actually did it—come meet me by the East gate and I will compensate you. All right?"
The child nodded a third time, twice, wide-eyed, at a normal speed. He then fiddled with his shirtcuffs, a diplomatic half-smile peeking out from his dimpled cheek.
Fighting back a crack in his voice, Noah let go of the sword and looked the child in the eyes. "Now repeat that, back at me. And whisper."
-
II'. The Greilands, Recapitulated
"Papers," Gabranth said. "For traveling South."
"I am starting to get some idea of who you are, lad," Byron said, folding his arms so that his hands were lost in the fall of his robes. "First, you come in looking like the war had its way with you and calling me 'sir', six months later you've got your run of the place and I daresay you know more of my finances than I do."
"I am good at mining for silt," Gabranth demurred.
"And other things, it seems."
Gabranth smiled at the former Earl's exasperation, and watched the old man's shoulder hunch, sinking into his wheeling leather desk chair. "Do not trouble yourself; I'll not be calling on you for munitions or forces or anything."
"But you will be calling on me for something."
"Papers," Gabranth said a third time. "For traveling East."
-
VI. Archades
"State your name."
"Gabranth Loessjunker, sir." He handed the docent the appropriate papers, forged competently and aged delicately, and the docent took them in such a way that would have cut his fingertips had they not been gloved.
"Place of birth."
"Landischloss."
"Age."
"Twenty-two."
"Current occupation."
"Recently exalted student of information science."
The docent waved a corner of his papers with a skeptical pique of his eyebrows. "This states that you only matriculated at Bachlein three years ago."
"Enclosed is a letter of reference from Doctor Franz Byron attesting to my sufficient accreditation."
With an expression of concessive approval, the docent rifled through the papers until locating the appropriate reference. His eyes flickered over the signature, and he flipped back to the top form without so much as a second thought. "Business in Archades."
"I intend to secure a Judgeship."
Perhaps it was only the bluntness of the statement, but the docent appeared slightly thrown. His pale forehead wrinkled and his thumbs pressed into the corners of the paper as he flipped through them again. "Date of trial?"
"One hundred and four days hence."
A moment after that answer, the docent found the slip and seal that confirmed it. "One hundred and five."
"My apologies, I seem to have made good time."
"It is of no consequence. Have you already made living arrangements?"
"Yes, with relatives of my erstwhile professor."
"Enjoy your tenure in Archades, and best of luck on your trial. Next," the docent went on, holding out the papers, which the young man accepted quickly as he strode past.
The sun shone low and ominously red and the skyscrapers cast their shadows over the sparkling river. Noah strode into them, and soon lost himself in them and the throng. He folded the papers and tucked them into his satchel, and began to mentally form his itinerary.
First on his list was deducing who wrote the trial. Second was procuring precisely what would be on it, and the answer key, if such a thing existed.
After all, that was what Archadia wanted.