Aethosphere Chronicles: Storm of Chains (3 page)

Drish sighed his own relief when it was
gone, but the emptiness of its passing revealed the towering
skeleton of the Palace sitting up on its hilltop perch, not more
than a kilometer’s distance behind them. Seeing it brought up too
many painful memories of the privileges he’d lost. That once
thriving structure had been a sensual delight of sights and sounds,
food and festivities, but now it was nothing but a silent tomb,
standing sentinel over a rotted city with its perpetual dead-eyed
gaze.

Domaire continued on, choosing a course that
took them purposefully away from any city lights, the absence of
which would only make the journey all the more difficult and
dangerous. At least in the light all Drish had to worry about was a
patrolling soldier’s questions, but in the shadows, he was just as
likely to be shot by freedom fighters as imperials. It left the
young ex-noble wondering just what the man’s problem was. Did the
guard in the compound frazzle him that much, to warrant a reckless
and paranoid course such as this?

Many street blocks later and Drish was still
no closer to an answer, having ventured far longer than he cared.
He was at his wits end and ready to turn back and leave the old
noble to freeze in the cold when Domaire finally stopped at the
perimeter of a soot-blackened storefront. “How’s your father doing
these days, Drish,” he asked breathlessly, “is everything
alright?”

“My father?” The subject caught Drish off
guard and he scowled. It was an issue more tetchy than Domaire
could have imagined. “If you mean, does he spend all the allowance
I give him at the tavern, and then come staggering in at impossibly
late hours—if he bothers to come home at all—then yes, he’s doing
alright.”

“I mean…” the old noble stumbled over his
words. Clearing the phlegm from his throat, he plunged a hand into
his coat pocket, and pulled out a slip of paper. “Here,” he offered
the item with a trembling hand. Confused, Drish daintily plucked
the paper from the man’s grasp, tearing it slightly as he did so.
“What is this?” he said, maneuvering to catch some of the light
from a working streetlamp down the road. “What am I looking
at?”

“It’s a list, my boy, from the Interior
Security Bureau, bound for the Military Governor’s Office.”

“A list from the
snitches
?” This was
shaping up to be far more intriguing than Drish could have
imagined. “What are you doing with it?”

“It came to me through the Liaison office;
on its way up the chain, but listen—”

“Why are you showing me this?” interrupted
Drish. He could feel the danger emanating from it, like a
stench.

Domaire looked paranoid and guilty. “I’m
showing you this, because, as I was preparing to pass it along to
my superior, I came across a name on that list; a name that I just
couldn’t ignore.”

A name…?
Dread filled the young
noble-born, and he didn’t need Domaire to say it, he already knew
the answer. “Arvis Larken.”

And just like that, it was like being back
in the aftermath of the Great Skies War, when patrols of imperial
soldiers scoured the streets for months on end touting similar
lists. First, these lists had held the names of fugitive military
personal and royal family members, then later they held Oath
breakers, and eventually rabble-rousers and insurgents. It was one
such list that Arvis had landed himself on a year into the
occupation. The old Baron Larken had certainly liked to decry the
Iron Empire, speaking to small crowds on the streets, or in
taverns, or temples; anywhere there was an ear that was willing to
listen; and one day that ear belonged to a snitch.

“Yes, your father is on that list too,
Drish, but—”

“So what it for then…this list of yours?
Sedition again? It can’t be much—”

“Oh, but it is,” interrupted the old man
with grave sobriety, “this isn’t just some list, my boy, this is
the
list—the list of major insurgent players here in
Throne.”

“Impossible,” blurted Drish loudly, as if
being angry would make his father’s name disappear from the paper.
“My father is a decrepit old man—a stroke’s made the left side of
his body useless. He’s no good to the resistance… For the sake of
the Pantheon Gods, he’s a drunk too! What good could he be to those
insurgent thugs…a major player?
Psh.
Shows what they
know.”

In the far-off distance the drone of an
imperial airship sounded over the wind, and they turned to catch
its probing searchlight, sweeping down through the flakes of snow
swirling above the old Commercial District a couple kilometers to
the east. “Calm down, my boy,” chided the elder bureaucrat as he
cast a paranoid eye up at that bloated behemoth.

But Drish felt anything but calm.
Calm
down
, he roared internally.
Calm down! My father is being
accused of terrorism, and this man wants me to calm down?

“There’s more,” Domaire pointed to the list.
“Take a look on the back, to the list of primary financiers.”

“Financiers!
Ha
,” the young
accountant scoffed. “Now I know this to be in error. My father lost
all his assets; titles, lands, wealth—all of it when he refused to
sign the Oath. He couldn’t finance a soap box to stand on let along
the insurgency! He has no money.”

Domaire signed heavily. “Just flip the page
over, son.”

Drish did as instructed and discovered the
heading: ‘Primary Financiers’ typed in boldface print; and there
beneath it—the very first name on that list—was ‘Drish Larken’. He
had to look at it twice to make sure, and then a third time to
study every letter as though perhaps the mistake was in that there
was a man of a similar name; but all the letters matched.

“My name…
My name!
How could this be!
No, this is some sort of trick; they would have arrested me already
if this were the case—”

“Drish; that
is
the arrest order. The
snitches can’t work without approval, you know that. This list was
supposed to reach the military office this afternoon, and you, and
everyone on that list, was supposed to be arrested before the end
of the night. You were never meant to leave that office
freely.”

And then it dawned on Drish, washing through
his guts like a sickness that threatened to loosen his bowels.
“That old bastard,” mumbled the young Candaran, thinking on his
father. “That dirty, old rat bastard…this is
his
doing. He’s
been using the money that I’ve been allotting him to help finance
the resistant. He hasn’t been pissing it all away on booze after
all!”

Domaire offered a sympathetic nod. “I feared
as much, Drish. Your father and I were friends…once. Perhaps we’ve
grown apart, given the different choices we made, but damn it, I
still owe him…even after the hurtful things he said to me over
taking the Oath. So that’s why I’m warning you now, Drish, for a
debt I owe. Know this, if I could lose this slip of paper I would,
but that’s not in my power to do so. I have to pass this list
along; too many people know I have it; so there’s nothing I can do.
But I’m an old man, so I can delay passing it along—till morning at
most. So whatever you’re going to do, you need to do it quickly. I
can give you that much.”

The nobleman’s head swooned, he felt like
sitting, even in the slushy mud beneath his feet. He was going to
throw up.
Arrest
, the word hammered through his head with
resonating implications.
What has my father done to me? Again!
How could he have used my money like that…and implicated me in
terrorism as a result?”

Domaire held out his hand, indicating for
Drish to hand back the list, which the younger collaborator did
without so much as realizing it. The next time his father’s old
friend spoke it was distant and hard to hear over the sound of
Drish’s own heartbeat pounding in his ears.

“I’ve done what I can, son, now it’s up to
you to figure out the rest,” and then Domaire turned abruptly, and
before Drish could get another world in, he was already
disappearing behind a curtain of falling snow.

It was a long time before Drish realized Domaire was
gone, and when he finally came to his senses, he found himself
leaning against a brick wall with freshly falling snow piling thick
on his shoulders. Cold rivulets of icy melt-water dripped from his
soaked hair and coursing down his collar, setting him to shivering
uncontrollably when they caressed his spine.

Well, that was it. Drish’s name was on the
list and he had to figure out his next move. Standing in the snow
on a darkened street was getting him nowhere, and so he staggered
home under the threatening weight of imperial decree.

As soon as he stepped foot through the
threshold of his townhouse on Cooper Street, Drish slammed the door
behind him and bolted it tight. He slipped the case off his
shoulder and let it fall to the ground, where it tipped over and
spilled its contents across the wooden floor. Normally that would
have infuriated the bureaucrat to no end, but his mind was racing
with all the dreaded implications of what he’d learned, of what was
coming, and what he could—if anything—do about it.

Up the creaky stairs, to the second floor,
Drish trudged mindlessly as his world spun madly out of control
around him. He found it difficult to walk let alone think. Anger
welled, with each step taken. In a rage he tore off his jacket and
flung it against the expensive arm chair he had arranged on the
second floor landing purely for aesthetics. Now it was just in the
way, and he gave it a savage kick for good measure, slamming it
into the wall and tearing the ornate wallpaper behind it. That only
enraged him further. Drish became a feral animal, stalking through
the house bringing ruin where he passed. First he tore the drapes
closed, blocking out the sight of any prying eyes or drifting
snowflakes, and that was just the beginning.

It was hours before he settled down enough
to think rationally. His tantrum had played out through the rooms
of his flat like a tempest leaving a path of destruction in its
wake. The landing chair and wall had been just the start. He had
flipped over the oak dining room table, strewn velvet sofa cushions
across the living room, broken most of the porcelain vases and the
delicate end-tables they stood on, he’d even torn down a priceless
painting of a moonlight glade—his favorite—and tore it in half,
leaving it as a broken corpse of canvas and wood in the corner.

When his blind rage had finally ended, Drish
curled up in the middle of the living room floor and hugged his
knees close to his chest. Near the end of his outburst he’d been
trembling so hard in despair that he ripped an antique family
tapestry from the wall and wrapped it around his shoulders. Using
it like a blanket, he sat staring into the empty fireplace across
from him. In the dead ash he found a strange sort of comfort, and
time ticked away under the steady clack of a clock.

Drish wasn’t sure when his gaze moved, but
suddenly it was locked on a bottle of wine set proudly on the
mantle. He chuckled bitterly; this singular bottle of wine was his
father’s most prized possession. The only thing of worth the man
had left.

“Coronation Wine,” sneered Drish, mocking
his father’s deep and resonate voice. He stared venomously at the
bottle’s waxen royal seal, before heaving himself to his feet to
snatch that precious treasure from its perch of honor. “Finest wine
in all the land, meant only for the lips of the Oberarch kings of
Ascella, on the day of their coronation… Isn’t that what you also
told me, Father?” He blew off a thick coat of dust that had settled
upon it. “…or was that just another lie?”

Pausing briefly to lust over the bottle’s
gold-leafed label, he grabbed for the top like a mad man, snarling
as he tried to claw through the waxen seal protecting the cork. He
would drink every damn drop of this forbidden wine once it was off.
That would show his father; would prove once and for all that the
Unified Kingdoms were dead, and that no man of Ascella would ever
ascend to the throne to drink it again. Drish would make sure of
it. He would become the
fool king
, with lips stained red
from over indulgence, singing the kingdom’s anthem like a bawdy
funeral song to the minions of his broken personal effects.

But he stopped.

It was no fun to do it here, not by himself,
the lesson would be wasted if his father was to simply come home to
the bottle emptied. No, the irate son wanted his father to see the
vulgar act with his own eyes… Drish fled from the townhouse
clutching the bottle like a ghoulish spirit—like a vapor
wraith—right into the growing storm without so much as a jacket.
His rage kept him warm.

The noble-born left his feet to their own
devise, and they alone seemed to know the best way to get to the
shanty tavern; the one that had become Arvis’s second home; a home
where Drish thought his father was drinking away the nights, but as
it seemed to have turned out, was actually the place his father
plotted best how to ruin his son’s life. Drish staggered along the
broad avenues, slipping beneath the silent glare of their restored
shops and cafés, making his way towards the grimier byways and
war-ravaged neighborhoods that skirted the charred remains of the
slums. He knew he’d reached them when he looked up and found shabby
tenements, close-set and stinking of filth and disrepair.

Here was in a place no civilized man dared
walked, but lining the backstreets, Drish found the cracked and
frosted windows filled with inviting light and warmth all the same,
enticing him to knock on the weathered doors and seek shelter, but
his relentless feet carried him on instead. Fortunately, the
streets tonight were blissfully free of the sort of riff-raff that
typically inhabited the ghetto. The cold and the wet had driven all
them into their hovels, which was good. The nobleman was loath to
think what an encounter with a lowborn slum-dweller might be like
in his state.