Cascade
Chapter Two: Lessons In Complicating A Good Thing
Amelia tilted her head slightly, but Saleh looked equally ridiculous at forty-five degrees. "Maybe my memory is really confused, but I thought all our insane magic-users in King Ephraim's army were women. Lute, yes, L'Arachel, very yes…" She turned to the red-haired mage, who looked slightly embarrassed. "Did he hit his head on something?"
"Ewan!" Saleh called sharply. "You haven't introduced me to your lovely ladyfriend here. Haven't I taught you anything about priorities?"
"He's a little bit crazy," Ewan admitted.
"Master Saleh," said Amelia, "we've met before. Remember? The Sacred Stones… events? We slew some elderbaels together in Darkling Woods."
"Really? Capital!" Saleh declared, throwing his cloak over one shoulder roguishly and striding down the street to a vegetable stand.
"There was an incident," said Ewan. "Well, not really an incident. More like a hideous side-effect. Remember Lady Myrrh?"
"By reputation, mostly. We didn't talk much," Amelia recalled. She, like the pupil, was watching Saleh juggle cobs of corn. As they flipped through the air, they began to pop, raining fluffy white kernels into a pair of large, borrowed baskets. This 'new' Saleh seemed much more comfortable around strangers than she remembered; he had obtained the basket by commanding the stall-owner's attention and saying "Just need this, won't be a minute."
"She's officially the Great Dragon now, since the old one was killed by the Demon King. The thing is, Morva was a lot older than her, and he had the experience to wipe out plagues of monsters, but Myrrh – well, she still looks and acts twelve," said Ewan, in a half-trance. The popped corn was now leaping in great arcs from basket to basket as Saleh paid for the cobs.
"Myrrh never acted twelve," Amelia stated. That was the first thing everyone knew about her.
"Never sounded it, at least. It's really weird being around her for days at a time, 'cause she'll go from laughing at the cute little rabbits or whatever to telling me about a horde of entombed that burned a city to the ground a thousand years ago and painted murals on the stone pillars with blood," said Ewan. At this point he noticed the look Amelia was giving him, which plainly said that he was never going to be forgiven for this free information.
"We are requested at the Keep, my apprentice!" Saleh called to them, frowning at the slowdown.
"I'll show you the fastest way there," Amelia volunteered loudly, then shifting her voice lower again. "Didn't he notice that he was the one doing street theatre with grain produce a minute ago?"
"Busking with husks? Nah, but that's typical of Master Saleh lately. See, he discovered this ancient ritual, back from the days when everyone on Magvel knew about the dragons and we all worked together to hold back the Demon Armies. Something arcane that would 'bind a human and dragon together, that they might divide harm and multiply strength', I think," Ewan recited, waving for the sage to join him in following Amelia's lead.
"That doesn't work mathematically," the knight pointed out.
"Yeah, that's why it's what we call ma-gic," he pronounced slowly. "The whole thing took days. If I ever have to chop mandrake by the light of a half-moon in an easterly wind again, I'll scream. But as near as we can tell, it worked the way we thought it would. Or it's going to. Myrrh's been sleeping in her temple ever since, and Master Saleh has been…"
"Intoxicated," Amelia suggested.
"But with holiness," Ewan added quickly. "He's not dangerous, but his memory… and his personality… and his hand-eye coordination, come to think of it…"
"Has he done anything incredible yet?" she asked. They walked down the street in silence for some time before Amelia noticed the increasingly uncomfortable silence, and Ewan's unyielding, baffled expression, with a dash of accusation thrown in. She recalled the hero-worship that the little mage had for his teacher, and quickly amended her question. "Anything new and incredible, I mean. Kinds of incredible that he couldn't already do."
"…Not really," Ewan admitted. The silence came back, this time awkward. "…I hope it goes away soon. Even if it didn't work."
"Absolutely stellar," Saleh declared, striding confidently behind them. "A truly marvellous structure, fit for kings and common people alike. How many sieges has it withstood to date, young knight?"
"The bakery?" said Amelia, following Saleh's admiring gaze to Johan's Breadsmithy. "Uh… I have no idea. But Grado Keep, which is at the end of the street over there" –she pointed, tugging at the sage's sleeve to drag him away from a display of a dozen elevenses– "has been sieged twenty-three times, and King Ephraim is only the second man to succeed."
"Fantastic. Just the place I've been looking for," he told them. "Ewan, I'll need you to familiarise yourself with the city – wander as you wish, but you must return to this place at four o' clock."
"You're sure your meeting with the king will be done then?" Ewan asked.
"No, I want you to get the last batch of fresh cinnamon rolls," Saleh explained, indicating the slate beside the door listing the day's baking schedule. "Bring them to the Keep and we'll have a lesson in aerokinetic conjuration this afternoon."
"Yes sir," Ewan said, triggering the impulse to salute in Amelia's arm. She resisted, and they watched Saleh march toward the front gates of the keep. At one point, he tripped over a carelessly discarded fruit crate, but turned the fall into a graceful cartwheel and continued unruffled.
"Could he do that before?" Amelia asked.
"Probably," said Ewan, glumly.
"It's still a kind of incredible." The mage tried to cheer up, but was clearly unsettled by his teacher's condition. "I'm going shopping. Want to 'familiarise' yourself with the tailoring bazaar?"
"Might as well."
Paladins didn't get a lot of paperwork. Assigning a knight to a vital task, in Franz's experience, usually consisted of pointing in the right direction and saying "More of them? Don't they ever just fall down and surrender? All right, you take that gate and hold it, we'll call in the mages against this group, and for the Light's sake, try not to die too soon."
It turned out royal clerks had a different method.
So he decided to return to his part of the barracks to deal with the sheaf that they had dropped in his arms, where there would probably be the right kind of quiet. It had been relatively quiet in Ephraim's new throne room, but it was unsettling, as though the air were full of important, volatile thoughts. The entire reconstruction effort was ultimately directed from that room, after all. Coughing at the wrong moment would probably cause flash floods and tectonic catastrophe across southeastern Grado.
His feet took him there of their own accord; Franz was already deep in the chronicle by the time he was ten paces out of the court. Page after page detailed ordinary Grado citizens who had vanished completely, without warning or any trace, and aside from the total mystery, hardly anything seemed to connect the cases. First disappearance reported by Commander Kyle on autumnal equinox, approximately three weeks (precisely twenty-two days) following ascension of King Ephraim to rule of Grado…
(That had been a chaotic month, with Frelia, Jehanna, Rausten, and Carcino unanimously calling for Ephraim to take rule of Grado, now that the entire royal family was dead. There had almost been a revolt, until Ephraim had taken the long road between Renais and Grado Keep, through a mountain range, and purged it of a particularly vicious bandit organisation. It was the sort of detour that changed public opinion.)
Second disappearance reported four days later by Corporal Parker, under similar circumstances. Apparent victim/abductee vanished from home during night, leaving no sign of struggle or altercation. The clerks had the usual stilted speech that Franz associated with people who wrote for a living, and were therefore totally untrustworthy until you were actually holding a blade to their necks. They had some kind of dark urge to use as many words as possible while saying as little as possible.
Ninth disappearance… Fourteenth disappearance… Franz flipped through the pages with a sort of hopeless intent, wondering how it was possible for anyone to walk down a street anymore and actually make it as far as a shop. None of them had been found, no messages had been left – what use did anyone in the world have for two dozen random citizen of Grado?
He opened the door to his barracks, and asked of anyone hanging about with nothing to do: "What do you suppose the chances are that there's a capable and talented homicidal maniac in the city that we don't know about?"
Two knight recruits looked up from maintaining their armor. As Knight-Sergeant, he was technically their commanding officer, but since he and Amelia were only on loan from Renais for as long as Queen Eirika wished, he tended not to give them specific extra assignments, preferring to leave that sort of thing to Forde and Kyle, who were only too happy.
"Just one?" asked Rob.
"Not likely," Archi added. The two were friends, possibly out of some shared past of misery – one was called Archibald by his parents, and the other Rabbie.
"Dozens upon dozens?"
"Lining the street and all demanding that we stop and solve every problem they've ever had while we're just trying to get our patrol done?"
Rob nodded and returned to the armor plate he had on the floor, a small hammer in hand. "That's more like it. …How is it so bloody easy to dent an ordinary legguard and so hard to get it un-dented again?"
"Hey, captain-man," Archi said, showing Franz about as much deference as he was used to, and about as much as he was comfortable with anyway, since they were barely younger than him. "Can I get the night off? My parents have got some kind of merchant-guild get-together thing, and they want me to help with the preparations – I'm not on picket duty, so I just need you to make sure I stay off."
"You know, when I was your age–" Franz began.
"What, eight months ago? Tell me all about it," Archi said, rolling his eyes.
"When I was your rank–" he tried again.
"Weren't you born at his rank?" Rob asked, innocently. "You must have been at least a corporal."
"Okay, okay, whatever, go," said Franz, heading past them and to his own officer's room. "And say hi to Flora the florist's daughter for us, since we all know that if she weren't going you'd be begging me to put you on picket duty."
"Like you're one to talk," Rob remarked. "What's that you've got, your latest sheaf of love poetry from the sergeant?"
"Hey, he can't brag that much. I saw her hanging around Westfen Street with some red-headed guy, looked like mage. They were having a pretty good time," Archi said, having been born with the death-wish that drove him to prod at officers. It would not serve him well if he was ever under Forde's command.
"Ah, shove it, Archi," said Rob.
"Ewan?" Franz asked.
The recruit shrugged. "I didn't hang around long enough to catch names; I was trying to get the patrol done."
"Mm," said Franz, as people have since the beginning of time when something totally innocuous but unexpected happens. It was the sound of a sea captain who's just noticed an iceberg in the distance, but is absolutely, totally, one-hundred-percent certain that there is no way it could possibly collide with them.
But he'll still keep one eye on it.
"What is all that, anyway?" Rob asked, indicating the reports in his hands.
"The glorious badge of the capable officer – paperwork," said Franz. He left the (slightly) younger recruits to their work, dropped the sheaf of pages on his desk, and locked the door for total privacy and quiet. Nothing to distract him from examining every case in intricate detail and find something, some clue, to tie them all together or at least give him some direction. Nothing at all.
"…Ewan," he said again.
"And you haven't given Franz the other reports?" Saleh asked, in a rare, totally sane moment.
"No," Ephraim admitted. He was pacing again, a hobby he had only taken up since he had also taken up the rule of the Grado Empire. On the plus side, the thick carpets of his royal chambers were the most comfortable material to pace on that the world had ever known. "I want his completely normal opinion of the completely normal facts, and your bizarre occult opinion of the bizarre occult facts."
"That doesn't particularly make sense to me," Saleh admitted. "But neither do waffles, and they certainly have their uses, so we might as well get on with it. Do continue."
"…Of course," said Ephraim, who had caught on to the generalities of the sage's condition, even if he didn't know why that was the fourth time he made mentioned waffles in the last fifteen minutes. "Well, as I said, citizens of Grado are missing and we don't know who's doing it. That's not your job to figure out – I want to know what you think of these sigils we keep finding. They're always there on something, wherever someone's disappeared."
Saleh accepted the sketch Ephraim handed him, bowing his head in slight reverence and shaking the king's hand heartily afterwards. "Hmm… very, very interesting… indeed," the sage remarked, looking the curiously twisted shape over.
"Do you recognise any of it?" Ephraim asked, hopefully.
"Oh yes, of course." Saleh noticed the king's intent expression and volunteered what wisdom he could. "This bit here is a spiral, and over here we have some curved cross-hatching, possibly a trio of overlapping Xs, and this big thing around it all is a square interscribed with a circle."
Sage and king watched each other, waiting in quiet incomprehension for someone to speak again.
"…And what does that mean?" Ephraim prompted.
"I have no idea. It hasn't a thing to do with any arcane ritual or sacrifice I know of. …Do you have reason to believe any of the missing people are or aren't dead?"
"I wish I had reason to believe anything," the king grumbled. "As it is, if you don't know what that symbol means, we're all in serious trouble. Sinister magic is never the best way to start a day."
"Don't despair so, my good majestorialityness," said Saleh, turning Ephraim slightly so he could clap him on the back. "Here in Grado, the royal mages have the largest magical library on Magvel – as much as Caer Pelyn tradition avoids books, we have an even older tradition of doing whatever necessary to indiscriminately hammer the enemies of peace into unrecognisable debris. I will begin researching immediately."
Anyone brave enough to venture into the theatre district of Grado – only a few blocks, but packed with performers – could be assured of not spending a moment with nothing to do. On a slow morning, only two or three different acrobats would be risking massive fire hazards with cannons, flame-breathers, or Act IV, Scene III (in which the castle is burned by raiding hordes).
The risk, of course, was the constant possibility of being pulled in for 'audience participation'. And the mimes. The eternal silence… of the mimes.
"We've got a lot in common, you know," said Ewan, as they watched the troupe form a pyramid in the centre of the plaza.
"You can balance six people on your shoulders too?" Amelia guessed.
"I mean you and me," Ewan said, rolling his eyes. "You, me and Ross were way younger than anyone else in Eirika and Ephraim's army – prodigies, you might say. All incredibly talented, intellectually adept – well, not so much Ross – we both lost our parents years ago and had to grow up on our own…"
"What's your point?" Amelia said, snapping a little more than she meant to.
Ewan recoiled. "Just saying we've got a lot in common." They watched the pyramid implode and leap, like the splash from a boulder hurled into a lake. "It can be a whole 'nother kind of tough, when no one else around you can really understand how tough it already is."
"Thanks for reminding me. Just out of curiosity, how many of the army can you name who have both parents?" she asked. Practically everyone had lost somebody, whether through war or the general unfairness of life. Eirika and Ephraim, Innes and Tana, Joshua, L'Arachel, Ross, Neimi, even Myrrh…
"…I don't know about Lute," Ewan said at last. "Never heard about her losing either one."
"She was raised by wolves, didn't you hear?" Amelia asked jokingly. Ewan gave her a look that said he didn't care for being mocked when he was trying to be serious, and in any case wolf-raised children were significantly more normal than that violet-headed sage. "…Intellectual wolves."
At that, Ewan relented and let out a laugh. "Is it cinnamon roll time yet?"
"Not quite," the recruit replied, reading the nearest clocktower, "but we can start back if you're eager."
"You there!"
Amelia suddenly realised that the entire crowd was staring at her, including the leader of the acrobat troupe, who was pointing at her triumphantly. He had been the one to shout as well. "Me here?" she repeated.
"You shall be the Maskéd Lady for our next piece! Please, come up to the stage!" the acrobat called in a ridiculously dramatic voice.
"Oh. Audience participation," she muttered to Ewan. "Can you teleport us? Just a block away would do the trick."
Ewan looked up at her – while Amelia had grown a foot since the Demon King's defeat, the little mage had remained resolutely little – and, with an evil grin, snapped his fingers. "Oh, drat," he said cheerfully. "Doesn't seem to be working today."
Silently promising to make him regret that grin for the rest of his life, Amelia trudged up to join the acrobats, who had added ribbony dancing accessories to their close-fitting outfits, obviously preparing for some kind of modern pseudo-ritualistic rite. Dance these days was getting more creative than was good for it, in Amelia's opinion, but she still took the mask. It didn't look remotely like her, and wouldn't for at least forty years and a debilitating illness, but it was entirely glass-gleaming white with a red symbol painted across the front.
"Awrl righ'," she said, her voice muffled by the mask, "let's get this over with."
Franz gratefully looked up from his desk when someone knocked at the door; reading about the scene of a crime was exponentially more boring than looking at the actual scene. "Come in," he called, shoving the papers slightly aside – after being given an assignment from the King of Grado, you didn't brush it aside lightly if you were attached to your limbs.
"Hello, sergeant," said Rob. "Making progress?"
"I wouldn't know," Franz replied. "I'll find out when it's all over, I guess."
"Good. …You do know you don't have to worry about what Archi says, don't you?"
Franz grinned. It was cute when fresh recruits tried to counsel their commanding officers. "Yes, Rob. I'm not worried, so you don't need to worry either." Although it's probably part of why I can't focus on this work.
"I won't," Rob said sincerely. He was being unusually solemn, compared to his regular never-really-seen-what-a-soldier's-last-job-is-about energy. "Sergeant Amelia is crazy for you, everyone knows that."
"Yeah, I picked up on that somewhere along the way too," he agreed, still grinning. "Really, I'm all right, but I'm starting to think that something is bothering you."
"You might say that," Rob agreed. "But I'm not concerned for myself. …Don't you ever worry about what will happen tomorrow?"
"Thursday?"
"I'm speaking more generally."
"Well, sure. Everyone does, a little, but I try to keep my attention on today. Not that we ever have trouble with that in a job like soldiering," Franz remarked.
"And now I'm speaking more specifically. About the Knight-Sergeant," Rob hinted. Franz had no idea why he was talking so strangely, but people vented their nervousness in strange ways.
"What about her? Do I worry that she won't l–ike me tomorrow? It's not like flipping a coin, although the King of Jehanna would probably tell you otherwise."
"But in the end, in the very end, it won't make any difference. You can't change life, and life does end. Even if you're the greatest heroes in Magvel's history, even if you survive every battle of your lives and your bond never quavers, one day one of you will die, and you'll be split apart. Forever. No matter how much you want to be together."
"…Rob, you're really starting to creep me out. Has something happened? Maybe to someone in your family?"
The corporal hesitated. "…Something has happened. Nothing has changed." There was an edge to his voice now, somewhere between bitterness and indignant resolve. He kicked the door shut behind him, and whether bizarre luck or something else, Franz couldn't guess, but the lock fell into place as well. "I am the enemy of death," he declared, and leapt at the paladin, hands outstretched.
Franz fell back, instinctively absorbing the impact, but rather than rolling and throwing Rob overhead, he found his back crushed against the edge of his heavy desk. Ignoring that, he tried to brace his legs under himself to push back, but Rob was stronger than Franz remembered, too strong, too determined. Franz wasn't much older or bigger, but paladins too have exceptional strength, and no green recruit should have been able to hold even against his resistance, let alone force his grip inchingly closer.
Shifting tactics, Franz pulled his legs up and let gravity drag him down, twisting as he went to smack Rob's forehead against the solid wood of the desk. That at least stunned him for a moment, and Franz followed with a sharp kick to the abdomen and scrambled for the door. He made it in three steps, and thought he was safe – but that was before factoring in the way the lock had welded itself into a solid mass.
"That's cheating," he growled, and got no further before Rob grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him around, and shoved him into the door with both hands. One wrapped around his throat, and it took a moment's desperate struggle before Franz realised he wasn't being strangled. Rob's free right hand splayed like a claw, and he pressed it against the paladin's armorless chest.
He didn't understand why until the soldier's fingertips began to dig into his flesh, at which point he followed a very ancient tradition, and screamed.
