The Crooked Key, Chapter 10: Not Literally
The Crooked Key by Kyle Marquis
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Chapter 10: Not Literally
“This is not what I expected,” Skaithness said, peering down at the fifty-foot drop. “I thought we were going to steal a jellyfish-squid and steer it over the ocean.”
She sounded scholastic; meaning in the dialect of the North City, both drunk and caffeinated, her words jittery and slurred. Maybe her armor had a secret apothecary’s shop full of painkillers and stimulants. The banisher feared she would not be up for their plan, but this was the only idea he could come up with on short notice.
“I’m going to disappoint you again,” Eilo said. “I can’t summon anything. But your words gave me an idea. There aren’t many city-spirits in this age of the world, but Baristoc has a few. And they shape our cities just as human traffic does. Lady Ryphonia and I learned about them from my mentor—”
“Why don’t you ever say his name?” Skaithness asked.
“A rath-gorla took it from him,” the banisher said. “Now don’t interrupt. Castle Nysse was a huge ruined pile by the time I came there, and its roof was full of holes. But my mentor taught us how to move around on them. We could run as quickly along those roofs as we could in the fields around the castle, as long as we knew what we were looking for.”
“Which was? I’m sorry, I interrupted.”
“No, I was waiting for you to ask,” the banisher said. “City plookins.”
“Do I ask again?” Skaithness asked.
“Country plookins mostly lurk in cabbage patches and work minor charms,” the banisher said. “City plookins are less common. All plookins were created to serve as messengers and monitors. They’re runners, about the size of a big cat. They’re great runners, in fact, and they have a talent for charming and shaping. City plookins shape our cities, even though almost no one knows how to use them as messengers anymore. They make sure there’s a clear path from one end of a city to another. I saw a few at Old Rock, and there were lots at Castle Nysse. And whenever I visited Fylent Maer, I used to watch them just before sunrise and just after sunset. That’s when they’re most visible, if you know where to look, and you’re standing somewhere they like to use. There!”
It was still dark, except for the fires caused by fighting. A little silver streak, like a falling star, hurried across the roof of an exchange building, then leaped onto the balcony of an apartment complex. It disappeared before Skaithness could see it, but she saw the next one for a moment as it jumped between an old thatched roof and a new slate one. And she was able to watch the third one almost halfway to the Winter Gate.
“Do we follow them?” Skaithness said.
“Almost,” the banisher said. “A lot of what I do involves scholastic knowledge, but a lot of it also involves feel. Mood. Knowing when a wild place is wrong, or sick. Or in the case of the city plookins, when it’s healthy, despite everything that’s happening down below. The plookins have made sure that they can get anywhere in this city from the rooftops. And we can leap just as far. Plookins have worked on the builders and architects for years to make the city the way they want it. Let’s wait another half-hour. Watch, and feel how they move.”
They watched in tranquil silence, drinking tea from the silversmith’s below to stave off their hunger. Eilo’s wounds throbbed, especially the cut above his knee. Down below, people were fighting and dying. At Old Rock, Nowan de Valc was assuredly making plans to find the crooked key and stick it wherever he needed to stick it to fix his flawed green stone towers. And now it was cold, especially up so high, when the wind howled. Despite everything, it was a lovely morning. Eilo cupped his tea in his hands and watched the plookin-trails through the steam. Finally he stood up, a little stiff.
“Let’s go,” he said.
He took the lead, since he had done this before—had done it since he was a little boy at Castle Nysse. His stiffness left him as he leaped from rooftop to rooftop. Though Skaithness was probably more injured than he was, she permitted herself a happy whoop at the apogee of each inhumanly long jump. Eilo had to rein her in: her movements were so graceful that she looked like one of Hausen’s brides in the air, but she was still as heavy as an armored knight, and she could punch right through a roof.
Not every plookin-path was clearly marked, but Eilo carried his glaive for more than just fights: he could use it as a pole for vaulting, or a hook for swinging. By sunrise, they could see the North City’s eastern walls. Skaithness engaged her mask once again and looked right into the rising sun with her sapphire-blue lenses. Eilo let her take the lead until they were suddenly on the eastern wall, having cleared the last and longest jump—Skaithness without difficulty and Eilo by sliding down a rope from an old watchtower using the pole of his glaive.
“Lots of guards,” Skaithness noted. Even this far from the Winter Gate, the duke’s cavalry patrolled the roads and knots of town guards stood in nervous groups, leaning on their halberds. Most of the people they could see had, an hour ago, been carrying out the Massacre of the Alewives that most accounts consider the actual instigating event for the Restructuring, but despite certain claims to the contrary, Eilo and Skaithness missed the Alewife March from the Bantish towns, the subsequent massacre, and the Pursuit to Lostdark—sometimes by no more than a few hours.
“Well, it’s a war,” the banisher said. “But Baristoc normally has crossbowmen looking out, and they’re all looking in toward the Palace of Justice right now. Right now, we can get down the wall and then hurry across the open terrain to the woods without being, well, shot by crossbow bolts.”
They turned and looked back at the capital city. Smoke billowed from a dozen fires, and though he was too far north to see the other, much larger half of Baristoc, he doubted the South City looked any better. The green tower was just barely visible through the haze, jutting out of Old Rock.
“It’s crooked now, look,” Skaithness said. Indeed, it now leaned like a drunk who had been out all night and needed the support of a soft friend or a hard wall. It was as flawed as anything else Nowan made.
They made their way down the wall unobserved and hurried through fields into the woods. Then they joined the road a mile from town. A steady stream of refugees were streaming out of the city, but most of them traveled slowly, with carts or elderly. Eilo haggled with one family for a brightly colored blanket, then draped it over Skaithness and cut out eye holes.
“Congratulations,” she said, “you’re a priestess of the Pure Mother of the Blue Wolf.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Skaithness said.
“Neither do I, but I used to see them in market towns until the Eggies drove them off,” Eilo said. “We’ll reach the town of Panirup in about an hour, where we can get food, supplies, and horses.”
Skaithness’s stomach rumbled under the cloth blanket and the interlocking armor.
“Do you even have money?” she asked.
“The men who killed my clanmate took his money,” Eilo said, “and I, um, didn’t have time to find Fylent Maer’s secretary and give it back.”
“Oh, brilliant!” Skaithness said.
“I’m not actually proud of that, though.”
“Then I shall be proud for you! Well done, Eilo! I think I want roast beef for lunch.”
Panirup was a trading post full of people who didn’t know if they were refugees or not. An air of surreal confusion hung over the town; people were too confused to panic. Rumors swirled of massacres at the Palace of Justice and in the woods outside of town, but no one there knew anything definite. Eilo wrapped up his glaive, then headed to a restaurant he liked where he splurged on a private room for the “sacred lady” in his charge. Trading posts saw all sorts of strange things, so the proprietor barely looked up. A few minutes later, a stewart arrived with roast beef and carrots, mashed parsnips in butter, and a whole loaf of golden bread, along with cider and tea.
The armor added about six inches to Skaithness’s height, but the banisher estimated that she was not a particularly tall or large woman. That made her ability to destroy an entire supper plate, most of a loaf of bread, and two slices of pumpkin pie all the more impressive. She was healing, too: already she breathed more easily, and though the bruises on her face had turned an awful yellow-purple, her split lip looked better. The banisher ate well, too. He checked his wounds and found them healing clean and fast. They were already starting to itch. He hoped Panzu was alright, wherever she was, and hoped idly that she would return—if only because Eilo expected to bleed some more before this was all done, and Panzu was a skilled healer.
With the false priestly garments flung over a chair, the banisher noted that Skaithness’s armor was also healing: the dents and scrapes were almost gone, replaced by the same intricate patterns and overlapping plates as before. Even the long gouge left by Nowan de Valc’s trident had faded. Eilo wondered if the armor needed meat too, or if it just pulled minerals from the ground, or from some more abstract and ethereal medium.
They spent Fylent Maer’s ducats on two horses. The banisher took a steely-eyed mare, slightly older than most young men wanted. Eilo liked his mounts hard to surprise, even if that left them a little slow. He selected a big and energetic colt for Skaithness. After a brief stop at a general store, Eilo could only ask Skaithness which way to go.
“East along the coast! Until we see the lighthouse!”
The banisher listened carefully at every stagecoach inn where they stopped. Amid the deranged or absurd gossip, the lies, propaganda, and tall tales, he slowly assembled a picture of what was happening in and around Baristoc, even as he traveled away from the capital.
Nowan de Valc had officially declared himself for the Trusted Seven. At first horrified, the boy-duke’s counselors soon realized that only the sorcerer could protect them from Lady Ryphonia and the city’s guilds, which were negotiating an alliance even as street fighting raged. After two days fighting Nowan de Valc, Lady Ryphonia fled by sea, promising her allies among the guilds that she would return once she raised a fleet. The street gangs dedicated to the Restructuring (it was not called that yet, but I will use the term for the sake of convenience) fought viciously, and held parts of North City and the neighborhoods around the Vernal Gate. Nowan de Valc’s monsters, rising up out of the Bay of Malafer, gave the Trusted Seven military superiority while alienating and horrifying most of the city.
From her new base, presumably in one of the border islands north of the Glyphic cities, Ryphonia intended to press her suit that she was the legitimate duchess of Baristoc. Her arguments were twofold: Duke Uleino had died in scandal and debt, a fact attested to by no less an authority than a wisdom cat whose words had been heard by at least fifty people, and the boy-duke was in service to a heretic and a sorcerer.
Everyone knew about the Mollusk Knight and his green tower and monstrous floating squid, of course, but no one knew what it had all meant. Nowan de Valc was not yet legally a heretic, nor had his father, Baron Valc, actually disowned him. Legally, there was no Nowan de Valc, as he had abandoned his title to become a hexguard, and then apparently died in the Bantish swamps.
The Church of Eime desperately wanted to avoid the whole mess, but Rythonia’s allies in the city demanded an investigation into the murder of a sacred courier. Even the Ovarch could not brush off such a crime. Rythonia’s allies made no official mention of the hexguards, but rumors swirled that they were in league with the Mollusk Knight, and therefore secretly opposed to the Egg of Eime, despite their great shows of piety.
After the horror of the battle, the sudden detente back in Baristoc struck Eilo as absurd to the point of hilarity. A sorcerer with a mollusk helmet had just killed a thousand people with a conjured tower and squid-monsters. In response, the aristocrats of Baristoc were suing each other in ecclesiastic court.
But as he thought about it more, the banisher’s mood darkened. Had the banishers been strong and numerous—had Castle Nysse not fallen to that one treacherous duke’s attack years ago, had they not grown so weak in the generations before that a single Emmer Duke could scatter them, had they not let the hexguards and the spirit-biters and the Gatemen of Usch usurp their rightful authority, a madman like Nowan de Valc would have been picked off twenty minutes after he put on his stupid helmet.
He should have gotten Fylent Maer out of town right away. They had all been marked men and women. Instead, he had spent an afternoon chatting with revolutionaries instead of helping his clanmate hide. He had meant to learn the name of the priest Panzu had killed, too. The sight of all those dead men and women at Old Rock would not fade, either. The sight of people who, a moment ago, had been killing each other, casually obliterated by a sorcerer they knew nothing about, infuriated him. They should have stopped Nowan de Valc.
But the banisher was still young, and his dark moods slowly faded. In fact, as they traveled down the coast, Eilo realized one evening that he had been enjoying himself. They both healed cleanly, and they both ate well on the road. Skaithness was charming company, friendly and ebullient, and desperately excited to talk with Eilo since she had to hide her identity from everyone else. She was also pretty, and as off-limits as an Egg nun. (One evening after too much cider, Eilo had discreetly inquired again about whether the armor could come off, and had received a clear answer in the negative.) This combination suited the banisher just fine.
Skaithness did have a creepy tendency to stand at the foot of his bed with her mask down while she slept, though. She slept right through the midnight watch, when Eilo was awake for a few hours, and then the banisher woke up every morning to see his own face reflected in the blank silver features. Still, he could forgive her eccentricities. Her good cheer was infectious, and she seemed convinced that they would stumble upon this lighthouse any day now, and that she would then know exactly what to do, thanks to the helpful words of the cruelly slain mendicant who had instructed her.
But as they traveled farther east, they eventually ran out of large trading posts and port cities. After three more days, they saw their last village. They had stocked up on supplies, but the winter was almost upon them. The horses would have little to eat, and Skaithness’s invincible armor would not save her from freezing solid if the temperature dropped too low at night .
And then, at the last border fort before the Emmer Duchies gave way to scattered villages and the remains of the seven Wolf Tribes, Eilo looked across a muddy street at a dismal-looking tavern. A tall steel hat rose between two horses.
“Hexguards,” he said, reining in.
“Aklurian’s, or Nowan’s?” the armored woman asked.
“Does it matter? They'll kill us either way,” the banisher said. “We can’t stop here.”
“But we were going to pick up—”
“I know, but now we can’t. We circle around and keep moving. There are caves in the hills we can use for shelter.”
They kept going, and did exactly that, though it was cold and miserable. The next day they hugged the coast, peering out onto the water, looking for anything that might be a lighthouse or the ruin of one.
“It’s out there!” Skaithness said confidently. “We’re almost there.”
“You know that eventually we’re going to run out of coast, right?” Eilo said, his voice tense. “It’ll bend back around the other way.”
“But not yet,” Skaithness said. “We’re very close.”
They lost most of the day after that dodging hexguards. It rained, and Skaithness’s horse developed a limp that Eilo could not diagnose. But they did learn whose hexguards followed them. When one of them found a scrap torn from Skaithness’s robe, one shouted for Aklurian, and they could hear him shouting orders in the rain.
“We can add impersonating a foreign heresy to our list of crimes,” the banisher said darkly as they huddled in a cave that night, eating cold oat cakes because they dared not light a fire.
The next morning, both horses were gone. They found only torn ropes—not even blood or remains.
*