Chapter twenty-one: Purge, sacrifice and bleeding from old wounds
It had not changed. Six years, eight months and forty six days, give or take a few hours and the old place had not changed a whit.
The Bunansa estate in Highgarden Terrace looked quiet from the outside, built of the red sandstone that most of Archades was wrought from, the façade of the town house was festooned in creeping ivy, the sash windows darkened and still.
Balthier leaned against the public park railings across the wide avenue from his family home with a sense of growing surrealism.
He kept expecting to see a child Ffamran Bunansa in Akademy reds, never a colour that suited him, dragging his feet on the way home, satchel scraping across the floor.
He expected to see Mildram his old nurse and the Bunansa housekeeper, the family having to hire only a few multi-talented servants because it was all that could be bribed to stay once his father dived over the brink of madness.
She used to have an odd obsession with sweeping the front stoop and the three white stone steps that led up to the double front doors with their brass knockers.
If he were to walk across the avenue right now and turn his key in the lock, the key he never threw out, a telling trait that, would it open the door still?
Standing here now Balthier was forced to admit it had not been all bad. It would have been so much easier if all his memories of Archades were filled with hurt and darkness. They weren't, surprisingly few of them were.
That was why it hurt so much. Why he couldn't quite throw off the shackles of his upbringing, his culture and his station in life.
Cidolfus Demen Bunansa had, it was fair to postulate, never been the most well balanced of individuals. It was for this reason that the first big word Balthier – or rather Ffamran - learnt to spell as a child was 'eccentric'.
Cidolfus had always been known as the eccentric genius, and because he was the greatest scientific mind Archades had produced in a hundred years the buttoned-down, supercilious citizens of Archades let him get away with being a bit odd.
It was odd that Cidolfus Bunansa married a woman below his station. A foreign woman no less, a Bhujerban Cid met while studying for his doctorate degree at the Ondore University, making his choice of wife quite offensive to most of Archades gentry.
It was odd that when that wife died in child bed Cidolfus took five months off work, letting funding and projects and prospects for promotion slip by, to grieve and tend to his rather sickly, very premature, baby son.
In Archades children served a purpose, to enhance and further profligate the family line, they did not exist for their own enjoyment, or most often, the enjoyment of their parents. Here too Cidolfus broke the mould.
Balthier shook his head sharply as if to dislodge the phantoms of lost innocence. It did no good as his legs propelled him forward of their own accord towards the old front door. Home, sweet home.
The locks had been changed at least once in the last six years but were easy enough to pick. He slipped inside to a silent and musty smelling house.
The half inch of dust covering most of the surfaces and the grime coating the windows did not mean that the house was vacant, as he recalled Mildram was an appallingly lax housekeeper, with the exception of that damned front stoop.
The front parlour was as it always had been, filled with the accumulated brick-a-brack of many generations of Bunansa's with more money than good taste. A museum exhibit illustrating the passing fancies of the idle rich.
Passing into the second, smaller parlour, the 'zoo' as the help had dubbed it, Balthier was forced to pause, a constriction tightening his chest.
Where once the small, cosy room had been filled with shelves and end tables covered with glass tanks, home to all his father's pets, Cidolfus having a fondness for small lizards, it was now empty.
Stepping in as quietly as a ghost Balthier walked towards one of the few remaining glass display cages and looked down at it, turning away quickly as the smell of decomposing miniature reptile rose up in a dry cloud.
'Damn you Cid.'
There was no reason, no logical, sensible reason why the death of Blinky, Cid's favourite Northern Reticulated Two Headed Brodwin lizard, should upset him.
By the looks of Blinky he had been dead some time, no doubt of starvation, in this hot, dry room. Even when Cid had all but forgotten his son, and forgone his wits, he had still remembered Blinky. That the favoured reptile was dead spoke volumes of how far Cid had fallen.
Although he knew he should leave things as he found them, some long buried instinct, the Ffamran part of him, busied himself with disposing of Blinky's remains and forcing open the dust clogged window to let in some damned air.
The kitchen showed signs of Hume inhabitants, suggesting that at least one person, a servant most like, still lived in the house. Cid had never ventured into a kitchen voluntarily in his life, especially not to brew his own tea and sit at the table with a crossword puzzle.
Balthier left everything as he found it in the kitchen, strangely heartened to find that someone at least was making use of this prime piece of Archadian real estate.
Whispering up the broad staircase to the second floor, Balthier noted the pictures lining the walls, portraits of long dead ancestors whose names, invariably, were either Cidolfus or Ffamran. Archadian gentry not known for their originality in naming their young.
He hesitated for just a moment at the threshold to the room at the end of the hallway, past the bathroom with its sunken bathtub and gold taps.
Pushing open the closed door he choked on the thick, stale air and the sudden deluge of memories he unleashed on breaching the threshold.
'Damn you twice, Cid. Damn me too for being fool enough to return.'
The bed was neatly made, the coverlet covered in a film of undisturbed dust. The book shelves lining the wall above the bed were over-laden with leather bound volumes. Aviation through the ages, mechanical engineering, twenty most infamous criminals in Archadian history.
Balthier grinned despite himself and pulled the volume from the shelf, careful not to disturb the others. He opened the book, with its cracked spine, and turned to one of the dog-eared pages.
BarleArgemanArchadia's most notorious pirate. Argeman was born in the year of the coronation of Emperor Gramis the Great and died at the age of fifty-three in his bed after a thirty year career as Archadia's most prolific and dangerous brigand….
Balthier remembered the words, the tales of this long-dead pirates exploits as if by rote, the words leaping from the page to stir his memory. He had had such macabre interests as a boy, no wonder he'd turned out as he had.
Losing the smile Balthier dropped the book onto the bed and watched the cloud of dust it unsettled. He walked over to the window in what was once his bedroom and pushed it open, drawing back the curtains.
The garden at the back of the house was wild and overgrown, at odds with the manicured and unnaturally pristine gardens of their neighbours.
But then it had always been so; neither he nor Cid had any interest in gardening.
Turning from the window, shafting sunlight pouring into the room like a thief stealing into a sealed tomb, Balthier walked over to the large dark wood wardrobe, still taller than he was, maybe even taller than Fran.
Balthier jumped back and winced as a pile of loose leaf papers, pens, compendiums and manuals spilled out onto the floor along with a beautiful, truly beautiful looking gun, of a make he had never seen before, but was oddly familiar.
Ignoring the remnant of school work and Judge training procedures that now littered the polished wood flooring, Balthier reached down and hefted the gun, noting the tag that had been tied to the trigger.
Happy seventeenth birthday Ffamran, a judge should have a weapon of merit to go with that armour.
Gods above and below! The gun slipped from his hands as Balthier recoiled in horror, tripped on a quill pen and fell backwards onto his mattress with an exceedingly un-gentlemanly curse.
If Vaan, or the Princess, or maybe even Fran, had seen him now they would not have known what to make of Balthier. Head in hands, leaning over his knees, back stooped in a way his akademy teachers had told him never to sit; Balthier struggled to simply breathe in and out.
That gun. Cid had given him that gun for a birthday present? Or at least would have done, had Ffamran not disappeared into the night two weeks before his seventeenth birthday.
Balthier almost laughed, sprawled in the dust of a life he once lived, feeling like a ghost returned from the underworld to re-visit his past and take stock.
The gun, twisted with ornate gilt patterning and sleek as a coiled serpent ready to strike sat in a square of sunlight, mocking him. The very gun Cid had put to his son's head and threatened to kill him with, almost seven years ago.
Balthier picked up the gun, one of his father's creations, only Dr Cid could invent something this beautifully vicious, and carried it over one shoulder as he sauntered out of his old room.
He walked down the corridor with a jaunty step towards the bedroom at the far end from his own. He pushed open the door a little more forcibly than strictly warranted and surveyed the bedroom of Dr Cid.
Good. The room held signs of recent use. The pine wood and cedar scent that he always associated with his father was thick in the room, which was cleaner and less dusty than the rest of the house.
'So you still sleep old man?'
The bed was freshly made and the coverlet turned down as if waiting for the man of the house to return. The blue walled room with its heavy dark wood furnishings was dimly lit, the curtains pulled closed and somewhat oppressive in atmosphere.
Balthier pulled a pen from the drawer of the side table by the bed and turned the tag on the gun around, pulling the tag loose carefully and leaning on the side table to scribble a quick note for his father.
Replacing the tag on the trigger he slipped the gun between the bed sheets, barrel resting on the pillow, just poking out from the covers.
Turning swiftly on his heel Balthier thought he saw, for just an instance, the strange and eerie spectre of the faceless wraith that had inhabited Fran's sister Mrjn in the Henne mines and Judge Bergen in Bur-Omisace.
He waited in that still room that smelled like home and reminded him of all that was lost and broken that could not be fixed but nothing untoward leapt out at him.
Shaking his head Balthier walked out of his father's bedroom closing the door softly behind him and left the house that was once his as quietly as he came in.
Balthier moved swiftly away from Highgarden Terrace and towards Central, surely Jules would have found Vaan and given him the Chops by now?
There were things that must be done if they were to breach Draklors fabled security and preparations to be made. No time to dawdle in bittersweet memory.
Having watched the prodigal child of its chosen vassal leave the former nest, Venat drifted over to the weapon he had left, strangely, in Cid's bed.
Without disturbing the physical reality of the bed Venat read the note that the son, long since fled hearth and heath, had left the father.
Dear Cid, thank you for the kind thought but when I come for you it won't be with a gun.
It was not signed but the heated rage that emanated from the neat pen strokes scoring the scrap of paper concerned Venat. The son was vassal to the Dalmascan Princess, the Occuria's chosen tool.
So they had made it to Archades already? Cid would need to be warned. Briefly the renegade Occuria wondered if the son, despite his words of hate and vengeance, had not in fact come here with the very intent of warning Cid?
Love and hate and all that was betwixt and between was a closed book to Venat, a creature of ageless indifference, the occuria worried that that ignorance on its part regarding the passions of Humes might not prove to be Cid's undoing?
The love and hate of son for father, father for son. The one equal to the other, neither force able to free either man from the shackles of kinship.