Rules of Engagement
7
Purpose
"Judge-Magister Gabranth wrote in his memoirs 'Time on a Distant Shore' that Draketongue's 'sole humanity' was the Old Kingdom's White Dragon clan's heir, Feng-yin. Little is known of what truly happened to her after the so-called Draketongue Crisis had ended, as the Old Kingdom keeps information about itself and its billion subjects close. Still less is known about how and why Feng-yin chose to follow an adopted uncle out of the luxury of the Imperial Court to a distant land, alone save for her personal guard. It is said she desired knowledge. The less charitable have suggested more lurid reasons behind her sacrifice, which are most likely unfounded. Feng-yin is, or perhaps was, the second heir of a powerful noble house of the Old Kingdom, and her love was a commodity to be traded for connections..."
-Excerpts from Piracy after the Succession War, by David Walsinram, University of Archadia Press
Feng-yin felt rather than heard the Ghostkin tense, beside her, as she inclined her head to the guards before Draketongue's private chambers. Her personal guard numbered four of her father's finest, and they were always on alert, just outside the Veil. "Draketongue expects me."
"Pass," one of the guards said, knocking a staccato on the door. It opened to the foyer, which was really a circular walkway over a white lily pond, the underwater light mottling the ceiling and giving the room a surreal, dim glow flickered by the thick teardrops of lazy carp. She skirted the walkway to the stairs edged into the wall, up to the second tier.
At this time in the day, she knew where Uncle would be. Draketongue's studio was a room with stark white walls, its concrete floor blotched with paint. There were no guards in the studio. His advisers, and even Feng-yin herself, had spoken out against that, but their words had fallen on deaf ears.
Draketongue was in profile against the row of long windows at the end of the chamber, closed against the morning cold. He inclined his head slightly to acknowledge her presence, and went back to painting something on a large easel, careless of the stains on his pale robes. On a low table beside him was a raised board of mixed colors, two cups of discoloring water, and a cylinder of brushes and pencils.
She circled behind him as unobtrusively as she could, to look at his work, and smiled. Draketongue was painting the Imperial City of Yangchen, in the soft blues of a winter morning. One of their favorite places: the golden carp pond in the Eastern Gardens, frosted over in the winter with thick ice, the fish as golden flecks under the frosted surface. There was the bronze bench where they had first been introduced, and the skeletal boughs of the Shenzi tree that she had loved to climb.
"Nostalgia, Uncle?"
"Passing fancy. The clouds reminded me." Draketongue's voice was distracted, as he dabbed bark into dry relief on the Shenzi tree. "What did you wish to speak to me about?"
Behind her, a drying painting seemed to float off a chair and move to lean gently against the wall, while the chair drifted over to rest just behind her knees. Feng-yin sat, with a nod to her guard. "The Judge."
"Ahh." Draketongue seemed emotionless, but to one versed in his moods as she was, Feng-yin saw the slight way the man rolled back his shoulders, relaxed. This had been a subject that should have come up long before. He did not have to ask her verbally to elaborate.
"One keeps a trained hound from its master to one's peril."
"Humans can have many masters, like dogs," Draketongue countered, without missing a brush stroke. "I have but forged anew a leash he likely did not know was there."
"His regard for the thinker-companion, Balthier. I do not think they are… associating."
"Deep friendship is often better a leash than tangles of flesh. Do not discount the Viera."
"The sky pirate betrays little."
"He is young as you are."
"Are you being insulting, Uncle?" Feng-yin grinned.
"You know me better than that, girl. You speak to me too much like your mother. Words within words. You wish actually to speak to me about Balthier."
"Words without words," Feng-yin retorted. "You speak too much like my father, with so little compromise." Her father's name would never come up between them. It was their agreement.
"You've spoken to him. There are few others about the Manse your age who have yet a mind enough to themselves to be worthy companions to one such as yourself. You would plead his life?"
"I plead nothing," Feng-yin said, and in her voice was an unconscious arrogance of a descendant of a line far older than Ivalice had entertained civilization. "I ask of motives. You are never wasteful. If you do not want his life then give it to the Old Kingdom in tithe to the White Dragon. We could have much use of him."
"I've long known your true purpose for being here," Draketongue said then, after a pause, the sudden coolness in his voice startling Feng-yin to a blink. "You are poaching, niece. Talent from Ivalice with which to build an Empire. Your father's, or your descendants."
Feng-yin relaxed subtly, as though relieved. Good. He had not guessed. His back turned to her, Draketongue did not observe. "The House wars stagnate, in a way that can only be broken by new blood."
"Your father's well-given to theatre. I had almost believed his anger."
Feng-yin's lips quirked briefly into a wry smile. "He is indeed not often given to wrath."
"So you ask his life."
"I have said."
"Then it will be yours." Draketongue shrugged slightly, as though he cared little. "Him and the Viera, but not the Judge."
"I care not about the Judge." That one would find his own way: her Ghostkin had already spoken to her, invisible as they observed the scurrying denizens of the Manse. Ones were coming, and it would amuse her a little to wonder if she should aid or impede them. But the sky pirate would know her aid for what it was. A life for a life. And she felt she might someday need favors.
Feng-yin's lip curled again. No, it was she who was most like her father, now. But had she not come to this barbarian continent, after all, to learn about the acceptable balance between brutality and leadership.
--
A lonely girl still, Draketongue thought, as he painted, as Feng-yin began to talk more chattily about the Imperial Gardens. Born to power, and therefore, born to few friends but a handful of eunuchs, invisible assassins and a white-skin 'demon'. He supposed if he had been the sort to entertain regret, it would have been having less and less time for the one true friend he had made in the Old Kingdom, as he grew more and more powerful. More like the father.
Here to learn... feh! Yes, certainly about machines. And certainly to find new blood for an old civilization growing inbred by its customs. But not in the way she made it out to be, Draketongue felt. Yes, Feng-yin was the herald. The jade phoenix, the herald of things to come. War.
Her father had said as much to him, after all, in his cold, precise way. But it was their way, not to tell their children; not directly. To see if they would learn their purpose, then sink, or fly. Feng-yin was the seed for war, in a series of intrigues upon intrigues whose surpassing complexity had at its core the work of her mother, her father's second concubine in public, his most trusted advisor in private.
To bear a child to be fascinated by the workings of the new world. To let her run so wild in her childhood under pretext of indulgence, such that her peers would forsake her company, such that she would befriend a newcomer as strange as herself. To help a stranger in his vendetta against his own race by making his birthplace the catalyst for the creation of a device that would plunge the nations of Ivalice into disarray, then war. Fit for conquest. And the reason: the loss, or the death, of a Clan daughter. The Clans would rally around the White Dragon's flag.
Favor from the God-Emperor. War that would break the centuries of inter-Clan squabbling that was slowly crippling the world's oldest civilization. Draketongue wished he could tell Feng-yin. He was genuinely fond of her: encouraged as it was, her kindness to him in a strange world had been equally genuine. He was fond of her, but his first loyalty had always been to her clan.
Draketongue brought the Shenzi tree into muted glory with a few finishing daubs of the brush, and felt that it was fitting how its spirit, in the Old Kingdom mythos, often represented the unwitting martyr.
--
Balthier has always been a gambling man.
He loved games of dice and cards, the feints, the tricks, the tactics, sometimes the cheats. Money is antecedent to this pleasure; it is but a way, as the cliche ran, of keeping score.
And there is no better gambit than to play with your own life at stake, where the dice and cards are words, actions, omissions. It is why piracy has come far more naturally to him than a Judge's life. It was why he felt so alive now, as he climbed on top of the round table at which he had been drinking with Fran, only slightly tipsy from brandy, to wait for the babble of voices to stop.
When the hush came, he spread out his palms, as though to welcome a storm. "Gentlemen, ladies. I've completed the weapon, and so I am right now, before all of you, exercising a right to name it. The Bane Cannon." In the stunned silence that followed, Balthier smirked, and executed a little bow, his heart a jackhammer in his chest. "That is all."
Fran and Balthier made it out of the door just as the uproar began. Denial, command, fear, and most of all, purpose.
All the pirates that had remained were here for the killing.
And Gods, he knew they would whet it first with the blood of natural enemies. Balthier hoped that wherever Varney and Nae had squirreled themselves, they were making good on their words.
The next corner walked him and Fran into a wall of Draketongue's personal guard, cold-eyed men who motioned that they were to follow. Balthier kept his smirk, but hoped he would not have to pay overmuch for making good on his.
--
Basch sat on the couch, facing the exit, and wondered why the armor felt so cold over his shoulders when he really should be overheating. He had not spoken to Balthier since that night: the man was obviously avoiding him. Even the message of the time of his rescue had been carried by Fran, as had the wish of luck, the promise to meet again.
His mind was a tumult of conflicting impulses, and irritably Basch supposed this was what Balthier intended all along. Want was too weak a word to describe the constant longing: it was as though, he felt, it had been there all along, but waiting for the correct trigger to be fanned into flame. Need was too strong a word, that his pride cared not to consider, which was inaccurate, in any case. Need implied lengthy association, infatuation: what he felt was not that at all; more like a constant, thorny, possessive worry. Basch was not new to matters of the heart: he recognized the emotion for what it was: a beginning of things, the spark from which something could grow.
Damned pirates. Did they have to steal everything? The reflexive thought amused him, startled him into a chuckle, and Basch rubbed his eyes hard with the leather edge of his gauntlet, uncaring of the cracked rasp of old leather against his skin.
Then sounds that were intimately familiar, for one born to his life: the ring of metal against metal, shouts, thumps. As Basch got to his feet, he felt could hear the whispery gargle of death-rattles in his mind's ear, even if the wall's proofing locked that out. Presently, the doors hissed open, and two men stepped into the room, one slender, one heavily built, both dressed in Draketongue guard livery. Behind them, the two 'real' guards lay dead. "Judge Gabranth," the smaller man said, beckoning, "We're to leave. Hurry. The killing's begun, and we don't have much time."
Basch blinked. "The killing?" Balthier had said nothing about killing.
"Aye, your friend's a smart one, I'll say," the larger man spoke in an odd burr from which Basch absently traced Dalmascan peasant-stock intermingled with a Balfonheim pirate slur. "Announced completion of the cannon in the tavern room. Ha! Knives were out even before Draketongue could call order."
Basch made his decision then even despite days of telling himself he would follow Balthier's direction. "We can't leave without them. We have to get Balthier and Fran."
"Aye, and he said you'll say that," the smaller one said, and there was something wry in his tone that set Basch's honed instincts alert. "I'm Varney Silverunner. My big friend there's Nae Marlinspike."
Varney held out his hand to shake, and Basch grasped the palm, warily. "Gabranth."
Then he hissed and jerked his hand back, at the feel of a needle's prick through the leather and into the pad of his hand. The world was blurring before his eyes, as he staggered back, slumped against the couch. He tried to speak, but his tongue felt thick in his mouth. The last words he heard were wrapped around a snort of irritation from Varney.
"Didn't we tell that damn-fool pirate lad to convince his friend not to wear bloody armor? He's going to be a fucken pain to carry to the hangar-"
--
They were taken not to Draketongue's office, as Balthier had expected, but to the laboratory. Draketongue was already there, within the glass cage, watching him with emotionless eyes. Feng-yin was at his side, and she smiled hesitantly at him from behind her adopted uncle's shoulder.
"Balthier," Draketongue began peremptorily, "You need not explain yourself to me. I already know why you lied."
"Lied?" Balthier inquired, with a feral grin. "You wound me, Draketongue."
"Driving back the chaos away from this laboratory has been surprisingly difficult, and we've lost control of the outer ring of the Manse." Draketongue said evenly. "Difficult enough, perhaps coincidentally, for Judge Gabranth to have mysteriously disappeared from your quarters."
"That's an incredible and curious coincidence," Balthier drawled.
"And you've not completed the cannon, by any means."
"I may have."
"If you had, I would have been told."
"And I would have been killed."
"That may not have been the case," Draketongue said flatly, and behind him, Feng-yin grimaced. Ah. Balthier briefly entertained the idea that he had made a mistake, then shook off the uncertainty. Even if his life had been spared by her doing, he was quite sure that Basch's would not have featured in the equation. Getting to know the Old Kingdom girl had been interesting, but he had felt through all her questions about his life that she had really been more interested in his mind than any real friendship.
"Uncle…"
"Your words have saved this man and his companion today, Feng-yin," Draketongue turned to regard her, his eyes ungentle. "But that is all. When you do complete the cannon, Balthier… then, we will see how my humor has changed." He gestured for the guards to unbind the shackles from Balthier's wrists. "Have the Viera put in a solitary cell. Double Balthier's guard. And the rest of you, prepare for the siege."
"Draketongue-" Balthier growled, furious, but was coldly cut off, as the man strode past him.
"You've made sport of my generosity, sky pirate. If you'll not have your Viera partner suffer overmuch, perhaps you should see quickly towards truly completing your project, before I lose my patience."
"Not quite so long ago," Balthier said, as Fran was led away, "You told me you did not wish war with Archadia."
"There is murder, and there is manslaughter, and self-defence, and things said to a person to get said person to do what you want at any given time," Draketongue's smile was thin. "Would you have aided me from the beginning were I to say the Judge was to die? Now, with the weapon complete, I would no longer have needed the Judge to be alive as surety. I would have thought you quite familiar with definitions and calculations, given your past history, Balthier."
"Shoot down the airship," Draketongue turns to his guards. "If we can cripple them, capture them. If we can kill them, no word is to out to Archadia, until the cannon is finally complete."
--
Basch woke groggily to the sounds of warfare. Gunshots and the ring of metal, and he was being half-carried, half dragged, his arms slung over uneven shoulders. His body's first response to the sluggishness was to panic, but he forced that down, made himself breathe regularly, and remember. Voices beside his ear.
"He's woken up, Varney."
"I can see that," Varney sounded amused, but there was an underlying strain in the pitch of his voice. "'least we took off some of that bloody heavy armor. Hope you don't mind, your Judgeship."
Basch wanted to talk, but words navigated his tongue only as a strangled murmur, even as his vision cleared out of the blur. They were in a hangar, falling back to an airship, sleek and blue, about the same size as the White Rose, which was right against it. Pirates fought pirates, and the room was slippery with blood and loud with gunshots and the hoarse moans of the fallen. Thorn abruptly darted into their vision, her broadsword and chain mail stained liberally crimson, favoring her right leg. "Ready t'go, Varney?"
"Aye, aye, missy," Varney grinned, then jerked abruptly, shuddering and collapsing. Unsupported, Basch went down hard onto his shoulder, the breath knocked from him, seeing the ooze of blood paint the pirate's shoulderblade. Varney was gasping in pain, coughing, then hissed, when Thorn yanked him to his feet with surprising strength.
"Go!" She hauled his arm over her shoulder and started to the gangway of the blue ship at a brisk pace. Nae dragged him similarly to his feet, grunting and cursing under the effort.
"Wait… wait, Balthier," Basch protested thickly, as he was pulled up the cold metal slope and dumped on the plated ground. His shoulderplates and breastplate had been removed, but thighplates, greaves and gauntlets appeared to have been given up for being too complicated. Nae was speaking in a low tone to Varney, then there was a Moogle dressed in green skirts pattering over, the white gleam of a cura spell. Footsteps indicated Nae had stalked off to the cockpit.
Varney sat up beside him as the Moogle padded off, the ship's glossair engines humming into life. "That didn't go so poorly. Though, I have to say, I really hate being shot. It just doesn't have the personal touch of say, being stabbed."
"We shouldn't have left them," Basch stilled his mind against the primal panic of being crippled, however temporarily, took deep, measured breaths, ignored Varney's good-natured chatter.
"No other way to spring you without an appropriate diversion," Varney began, then cursed as Nae's voice crackled into the internal broadcast.
"Cannon at eight o' clock! Cannon at eight o' clock! Hold on, mates, this could get a wee bit hairy!"
"Well, somebody's enjoying himself," Varney scowled, dragging Basch up against the wall, then hooking one arm over the low vertical bar set next to the raised gangway. "Sorry 'bout this, Judge." Varney had just held him up via an arm over the chest against the wall when the ground seemed to tilt crazily at an angle, for such a large airship. Basch's stomach seemed to lurch sickeningly down to his boots, as loose items clanked and rolled across the deck: a cylinder of a map, someone's plastic cup, and a screwdriver. He concentrated hard on these items to push down the automatic bile. Aftereffects from anaesthetic and aerial acrobatics did not go well.
The ground seemed to shift again, and Basch grimaced as the map rolled back down over the ground and promptly hit him over the flank. A sea map of the edges of Archadia's territory: he frowned blearily at it before Varney grabbed it and tucked it behind his back. Ah. That was it. The name finally clicked. "Varney Silverunner. Pharos Draehra."
"Pleased to meet you too, I'm sure," Varney grinned. "I'll shake your hand, but the drug will wear off only in half an hour or so. Sorry 'bout that, we were warned that you may be difficult."
"Warned… by Balthier?" Basch breathed out a sigh of relief when the ground finally stabilized, to a wild whoop of triumph over the broadcast.
"We have cleared the Manse. Repeat. Cleared and flyin' home. Over an' out."
Varney waited until the crackle of static died off, then nodded absently. "Hope the lad knows what he's doing. Dangerous gambit he was playing."
"Gambit?"
"Pretending to have finished the cannon. Announcing it to sow chaos."
"I saw Thorn in the hangar."
"Aye. There's a lass who knows where the wind blows. She didn't want the cannon in Archadian possession, sure, but didn't like how Draketongue seemed to be treating its acquisition." When Basch blinked, uncomprehending, Varney added, "Her Purveema's a small 'un. No match for Draketongue's might, if it came to that. Your master's been busy with contracts and agreements, Judge. Some o' us helped you just so to wash our hands o' the matter, until it settles."
"I see." Basch realized he really shouldn't have been surprised. True pirates, creatures of the air or the sea, disliked authority from whichever side of the gallows. That made Balthier's position now, left in the Manse and possibly paying for his part in gambling Basch's freedom, all the more tenuous. He felt an irrational pang of guilt for leaving him behind. Logic was no comfort for regret, and the thorny worry ate at him constantly.
He could only hope that Balthier's – and Fran's – resourcefulness would be sufficient for them to free themselves, or at least to survive until he could persuade the new Senate to allow him a force with which to return. In terms of friends, Basch did not believe in balances of debts, only in preservation.
-tbc-
