Chapter 12: Still Alive

After another twisting journey through the increasingly logical hallways of Charlemagne's fortress, Welking found himself in a small white room with Charlemagne and Katrina. Okay, maybe it wasn't all that small, but Charlemagne's towering armored form made it look positively tiny. "So, what are we testing?"

"A simple comparison of weaponry. Stand inside the circle there, please."

Charlemagne pointed to a red dot at the end of a short corridor off one side of the room. Welking obliged, though somewhat pensive about the explanation given. "Okay, but why's she here?"

"Katrina has accompanied us because her aim is exceptional, and a good aim will be required for an adequate comparison." Charlemagne disappeared from sight, leaving only Katrina visible in the small section of the room Welking could view from within the corridor. In less time than it took to write that last sentence, he returned with a bow, a quiver with a single arrow, and two rodlike objects Welking couldn't identify. He handed the bow and quiver to Katrina, then placed the other objects just outside of sight. Then he stepped back a few paces, and procured a small board and a thin black rod (most likely a pen, although he didn't seem to have an inkwell) from a slot in the wall. "Katrina, his left shoulder, please."

In all honesty, even at this range Welking could have dodged the shot. But he was lost in thought, considering the nature of Charlemagne's writing implements, and the danger of a bow being drawn in front of him eluded his mind for so long he only had enough time to widen his eyes as the arrowhead sank into his shoulder. He fell to one knee, specifically his left one so he wouldn't bump the arrow and drive it in further, and clutched at the shaft.

Katrina's expression immediately switched to panic, and she yanked a white bag off the wall and ran to his side. She carefully opened the wound enough to extract the arrowhead without further damage, then opened the bag to procure a small cylinder with an extended tip. "Biofoam; this'll stop the-"

At that point, though, there was nothing to stop. The blood flow had been practically nonexistent from the start, and muscle and skin tissue that had jumped forward nearly immediately had almost finished bridging the gap. A thin trickle of liquid pushed out foreign material as the wound finished closing, and the scarring and swelling began to fade.

Charlemagne cleared his throat. "On a scale of zero to ten, with zero being nonexistent and ten being excruciating, how would you rate the severity of your pain?"

Welking held his shoulder still; despite the immediate recovery, the wound still bore traces of his prior pain. "Ugh… seven."

"Only seven? Interesting." He made a few notes on the board. "And do you have any other comments to add?"

"You shot me… wid an arrow…" The statement didn't seem to necessitate any punctuation beyond trailing off; the sentiment was something that an exclamation couldn't quite express.

"This is true, at least in the figurative sense. I chose you as a subject because your supernatural healing rate will allow for proper comparative testing without prohibitive recovery time or irreparable damage." He gestured to a chair just outside the corridor. "Have a seat and let the damage finish recovering."

Welking pushed himself up to his footpaws and flexed his shoulder. "Atshully, I think I'm good for round two."

"If you insist." Charlemagne picked up one of the foreign devices he'd placed out of sight. This one consisted of a metal rod, which appeared to be hollow, with a polished wooden chunk off one side like some kind of mace that had gotten itself backwards. The point where the two met had a few metal curls and divots on its surface; from this distance Welking couldn't identify their purpose. Decoration?

"This is a Riften Royal House Constable's rifle. Born of the constant war effort between the Royal House and the Kotimaa Shrew Union, the rifle is a ranged weapon that utilizes the destructive force of a tool commonly known as stormpowder to fire a small round known as a bullet out the barrel. A single shot from this will most likely paralyze a beast for life, and that's just assuming it misses vitals. If it hits anything a beast actually needs, well, hasta nunca. We can only count our blessings that their war keeps them too preoccupied to cross the Kiviseina Mountain Range into the Northlands, and bring this weapon too."

"And yer gonna shoot me with it."

"Naturally. Well, figuratively. Katrina?" He handed off the weapon and picked up his noteboard again. "Whenever you're ready."

Katrina put the wooden part of the rifle to her shoulder and aimed the barrel at Welking. This time aware that he was going to be shot, he stood upright and braced himself. Still, the report of the rifle when Katrina finally fired was enough to make him wince again. Then came the pain.

The bullet that came forth from the rifle, almost too fast for him to see even looking directly at the rifle, dug into his shoulder with gusto. He felt it blast through his shoulderblade, tear at least a few tendons, and then fly out the back, all before his reaction to the initial explosion was complete. He fell to the ground again, letting out a sound somewhere between an anguished scream and a primal roar, and clutched at the wound as he rolled about in pain. This time there was blood, and quite a lot of it.

Katrina was more resolute this time, knowing that attempted medical attention would only mean contamination of sterilized supplies. Charlemagne was once again visibly unfazed by the events before him, watching with a posture of purely scientific indifference. "On a scale from zero to-"

"Nine!"

He marked down the assessment. "I see; 'things can always get worse'. And would you like to revise your analysis of the arrow shot?"

"Six! Oh dear gods in heaven, that hurts!"

"Please feel free to continue swearing; personal studies have determined that it tends to mitigate pain."

Welking stood up shakily, taking a few deep breaths. "No, no, I think I'm good… I'll take that chair now…" He stumbled out of the corridor, a trail of blood attempting to follow but promptly stopping when the source finally closed up again. "Oh gods, I can feel the bones…"

"That's to be expected, seeing as some of them are still in the corridor rotting. Their sudden reappearance is bound to feel quite unsettling to your system."

Welking eased into the chair, wincing at the sudden rippling feeling he felt across his chest and arm. Had he brought it up to Charlemagne, he would have learned that the force of the bullet affected more than just the initial impact zone, exerting itself on bodily fluids across a significant area of his internals. Had he been an ordinary beast, the hydrostatic shock would have caused severe damage in addition to the original wound. Of course, had he been an ordinary beast, the rupture of the large artery leading into his arm would have most likely killed him well before he'd have to worry about anything like that.

While he waited for the shaking feeling under his skin to stop, he stared at Katrina's legs with a curious, and not at all respectful, look. (Seriously, it makes beasts uncomfortable when you stare.) The pointed prosthetics were reminiscent of peg legs that he'd seen on a few corsairs out on the Western Ocean (another sourceless memory he didn't stop to question), but how she managed to stay balanced on them eluded him entirely. And with his stunted memory, he probably stood no chance of figuring it out any time soon…

Oh. Well, just use your mouth, ya jeenyus.

"How d'you walk?"

Jeenyus.

Katrina gave him a funny look. "I just put one paw in front of the other." Holding a straight face clearly wasn't one of her strong points; she held the confused expression for about half a second before breaking into a wide grin.

Welking bent over in a fit of sniggering, one paw over his face. "Okay, yeh, that wasn' the best choice of words. What I meant was, how d'you stay up on those pegs? Seems like it'd be hard ta balance."

"Yeah, no, that's what I thought you meant. Well, it's kinda like… well, have you ever seen those little toys with the disk in the center that spins and makes it stand up?"

"Uh, no, don't think I ever have. 'Course, my memory's not that good, but even then I don' think a pirate crew would find somethin' like that."

"Oh. Well, then I don't really know how to explain it to you, cuz that's what it's based on. And actually, beyond that, I don't really understand it much myself."

"I've showed you the blueprints multiple times," Charlemagne said.

"Doesn't mean I understand them, Dad."

"True." He turned to Welking. "The prosthetics are based on auto-balancing gyroscopic stabilizers connected to a nerve signal interpreter. The internal processors automatically calculate the required movement of the internal gyroscopes to maintain comfortable movement even at a full dash, and support the body at as low as 5 degrees angle from the ground, and as low as 15 degrees on one leg. The tip contains morphing patterned microsurfaces designed to increase traction against relatively smooth surfaces, allowing better traction on the ground, along with traversal of difficult slopes."

Welking had maintained the same attentive expression throughout the entirety of Charlemagne's explanation. He continued to hold it for a few seconds, then said, "Okay, I unnerstood about haffa th' words yeh jus' said, and I don't think it's the half that yeh were tryin' to communicate."

"Don't worry, there won't be a test. It took me three years to perfect that design; I wouldn't expect you to learn it in an afternoon."

"Years?"

"Oh. Yes. Sorry." Charlemagne shifted awkwardly in his armor. "Years are a time measure used by several communities of more longevous beasts south of Portus Cale. They represent the full cycle of four seasons, eighteen lunar cycles, or approximately 554 days."

"Ah." Welking stood up, the mending in his shoulder feeling complete. "Well, I'd ask what 'longevous' means, but I don' want another word come up that I'd need defined. Let's just get back to shootin' me."

"You're surprisingly calm about this."

"Yeh, well, way I see it, I'm heaven knows how deep unnerground, in a tiny room with a beast twice my size that wears armor around like a second skin, an' a marksbeast that c'n shoot me in th' exact same spot twice with two completely different weapons. What'm I gonna do, run away?"

"You could just ask us not to shoot you."

Welking stopped, dumbfounded surprise on his face. "I hadn' considered that."

"The fight or flight response is not designed to assume a threat will stop when asked."

"Well, I foun' out about somethin' way more deadly than an arrow. Long as I'm learning stuff, let's keep doin' this." He stepped back into the corridor, taking his place in the red circle again.

"Hopefully this one won't hurt as much." Charlemagne picked up the other foreign object - most likely some kind of rifle, judging by its similarity to the last weapon - and handed it to Katrina. "Left shoulder again, please." Katrina nodded, raised the device to her shoulder, and fired.

Welking hissed through his teeth. "Eugh, that… didn't hurt nearly as much. About a three, I think."

Charlemagne marked it down. "The round is laced with an F-type sedative. You may wish to lay down before the toxins kick in."

"Whuh?..." Without warning, a wave of exhaustion and nausea hit him. He held a paw up to his head and stumbled forward, eliciting another panicked response from Katrina, who ran forward to help him. He never felt himself fall into her arms; he was already asleep when she caught him.

If time passed while he was asleep, he didn't notice; when his eyes opened again he found himself still in the same room, lying on the ground with Katrina at his side. "Dad, he's waking up again," she informed her father.

Who wasn't in the room.

He was about to question her sanity out loud, when the sound of slightly rushed, metal-shrouded pawfalls echoed from outside the door. Shortly, Charlemagne's helmeted head appeared in the doorway, followed by the rest of his body. "Interesting. Your immune system must bear the same natural porcilivity to… pro-cli-vi-ty. Your immune system must bear the same natural proclivity to speedy recovery as the rest of your body." He put a gauntleted paw up to his face. "It's one thing to know these words, and another thing to say them correctly. My, that's embarrassing."

Welking climbed up to his feet, for at least the third time since he'd met Charlemagne. "Juss a bit." He flashed a grin. "Even th' great warlord is flawed."

"Now that's not fair," Charlemagne chided, waggling a pawfinger. "I'm not a warlord; I'm an engineer."

"Sure y'are." Welking stretched, his maw opening in a tremendous yawn. "What'd ye put in that, uh, 'bullet', anyway?"

"F-type sedative." Charlemagne picked up the second rifle, which seemed designed more for function than form. He triggered a small mechanism on its surface (most likely the side, judging by the grip), causing a rectangle of metal to eject from the underside. This he then pulled out the rest of the way, then removing a small needle from the side that was deepest in the rifle. He passed this over for Welking to inspect. "A special concoction I derived from the formula for Flitchaye gas. The needle is designed to dispense it on contact, incapacitating a target and effectively removing them from combat nonlethally. Had I had this in my arsenal during the… beach incident, a lot of death could have been avoided."

Welking laughed mirthlessly, his gaze still focused on the needle. "Fightin's death. 'S just th' way it is."

"It shouldn't be. Not my fights. Technology is meant to help creatures, not slaughter them."

Welking looked up. "N' how's that workin' for yeh?" He set the needle down on the lone chair in the room. "That rifle there, the Royal House Whatever one, that's teknollergy. 'S death, too. Yer armor's death. That… hollow… thing, that's death."

Katrina spoke up. "He's got a point, Dad. You can't fight a clean war."

"Then I will redefine war so I can." He pointed at Welking. "You've held a Tether. You've seen the Void for yourself. Would you wish that on anybeast?"

Welking balked. "Erm, eh, well, if they deserved it…"

"And what would a beast have to do to deserve eternal torment, hm?"

"Um… well, I guess they'd hafta be really bad."

"How bad?" Charlemagne shifted. "For that matter, what is bad? Who defines evil?"

"Um…"

"Would you say that Cluny the Scourge, historical oppressor of Redwall, was evil?"

The memory of this historic figure came easily to Welking's mind, a lone fragment of his memory unedited by his injury. "Oh, well, yeah. I mean, from what I been told, he was horrid!"

"And what of the dictatorship he opposed in Portus Cale? What of the tyranny he fought to stop, the very same that he was forced to flee north from, with the beasts under his command? Did you know that, as a direct result of his actions, that dictatorship fell within a single generation?"

"Uh…"

"He came to Mossflower seeking a new home for his displaced resistance, not an empire of his own."

"So yer sayin' 'e was a goodbeast?"

"No, certainly not! He was as much a tyrant as the regime he opposed. What I'm trying to say is that we can't be judges of which beasts are good and which are evil. Our views are faulty and partial; we can't know every factor that motivates a beast to pursue its actions."

"Well, wait a tic. If Cluny really did anythin' good, why do beasts call 'im a villin?"

"Because he lost."

"Thass…" Welking scratched the underside of his jaw, nodding slightly. "'S a good point."

"You can't judge anybeast just on what you know of it, because what you don't know could change everything. And so, I do my best not to kill, if at all possible. Life is a sacred and beautiful thing, no matter what beast uses it."

"But life wouldn' be so presshus if there weren't an end."

"And I will not be that end. I won't be an instrument of death again." Charlemagne turned to the door. "Katrina, please put away the rifles and initiate residue de-contam. I don't know how much of Welking's fluids have stayed outside his body, but I don't want to find out the hard way." With that he left.

Welking was left blinking away surprise. "'Again'?" He glanced at Katrina, who simply shrugged. With no other recourse to answer his questions (and no clue how to get back to his room), he charged out the door in pursuit, one pawfinger raised. "Wait! I now 'ave addishernal questions!"

Okay, maybe I'm overstepping a bit here, but it seems logical to me that a world that uses seasons as a standard measurement for long periods of time is going to require longer seasons as well. We'll just chalk the specifics up to divine (or natural) calibration, and try not to think about the immense orbital ramifications.

Also, yay, reimagining canon figures! Worth pointing out now that this was the source of the name for Portus Cale; one of Cluny's debated origins was Portugal, so I went digging in the etymology for a name that wasn't automatically associated with the real world. Apparently, Portus Cale means either "beautiful port" or "warm port"; we're not sure of the etymology of 'Cale' before Latin settlement of the region.

Credit to Jonathan Coulton for the song title.