Aethosphere Chronicles: Storm of Chains (5 page)

Arvis slammed his fist down on the table,
setting the coronation bottle to rocking side to side. “Can’t you
stop thinking about only yourself for one damn moment, Drish?
People are in danger, very important people!”

That was it, it was clear Arvis felt more
for his riffraff ‘resistance fighters’ than for his own son. The
sting of it was more unbearable than the day they’d fought over
signing the Oath; after Arvis had refused, and Drish accused him of
trying to destroy everything they had.

“There are more important things in this
world than our damned wealth and nobility,” Arvis roared back that
day three years ago. “I’ll not take the Oath.”

But Drish wasn’t done either. He wasn’t
about to rollover and let his father destroy their family’s legacy.
His grandmother would never have allowed such a travesty to occur
under her watch, and neither could he. “Then I’ll do it…in your
stead, father!”

“You’d do that? You’d sell yourself to the
Empire? You’re a coward, and no son of mine, you traitor.” And then
Arvis stormed from their city-manor a few kilometers north of the
Palace.

Drish would end up taking the Oath only a
few hours later, but it would not save his family’s lands, titles,
or wealth. He wasn’t the Baron Larken after all, Arvis was.

It was a year before Drish saw his father
again, and only in brief when he’d ventured from the refugee camps
in Brasstown to the stockades in Throne to see if the rumors were
true, that Arvis had been arrested for sedition. He almost didn’t
go and see the man, but sentimentality won out, and he relented; a
decision he would quickly come to regret. Even covered in filth and
chained to a stone wall, Arvis had the audacity to lecture his son
on loyalty and staying true to the UKA, even in tough times. And it
seemed nothing had changed since; a year in prison, the stroke, a
year spent sheltered under Drish’s roof; nothing had changed the
man’s conviction. Arvis was just as stubborn as ever.

“So this is how it’s to be, two strangers
who just happen to share the same last name,” croaked Drish
resentfully, and he turned his back to his father. There were more
words that came from Arvis’s lips but his embittered son had
stopped listening. Instead, he blew through the doorway, seeming to
float down the corridor, while vaguely wondering if the insurgent
fighters would kill him for uncovering their secret headquarters.
It didn’t seem to matter if they did. Drish was going to be a dead
man anyway when the Empire came for him.

“Drish, wait,” it was the harlot—or
insurgent—he actually wasn’t sure what she was anymore. He wasn’t
sure about anything. It wouldn’t surprise him if she was to be his
assassin.
Is that why she’s here now? Is she the one who will
silence me?
But she wasn’t there to silence him at all.

“Are you leaving already?” She said, blocked
his way with her small frame.

The noble only grunted a reply. There simply
wasn’t any words for what he was feeling, and he was loath to try
and sort it out with this garishly-dressed circus clown. He tried
to step around her instead, but she placed a hand lightly on his
chest. It was almost caressing in its touch.

“You look awful, are you okay? What’s going
on?” Abigail probed his face until he was forced to meet her
gaze.

Is that concern glistening in her
eyes?
It had been so long since someone had shown him anything
but contempt; or at best indifference; that he found it difficult
to suppress the rusty emotions that were beginning to stir within
his heart. It was like these emotions were desperately trying to
break free, gearing up as if to make a connection with the
fingertips pressed to his chest. Suddenly he found himself wanting
to share everything with her.

“Talk to me, Larken, is something going on?
You look ghosted. Does this have something to do with Arvis?”

Arvis…blah!

Hearing his father’s name spoken from the
lips of this mesmerizing woman slammed shut the door on any
emotions he might have felt, and instead locked them firmly in the
dusty basement where they belonged. What a fool he was for thinking
he could’ve made an emotional connection with some female street
urchin. Insurgent or not, she was just another lowborn in sooty
makeup, and; as his grandmother would have reminded him if she was
still alive; too far beneath his station to ever matter. He brushed
Abigail aside, leaving her concerns unanswered, so that he could
drift away from the packed tavern like the ghost she accused him of
being.

In a trance of dejection, Drish took to the
barren streets, shambling through a raging blizzard, until he ended
up back at the door to his townhouse on Cooper Street.

Safely tucked inside the warmth of his home, Drish
tried to go to sleep, knowing the morning hours would arrive soon
enough, but every time he tried to lie down a restlessness took
hold.
What will the morning bring?
He’d be expected to
report to work in the morning, but if Domaire was right, an arrest
squad would be there waiting for him. However, if he failed to go
to work at all, he would receive a truancy mark and probably lose
his position; and how would it be viewed? Running might only prove
his guilt to those that would condemn him. With hopeless dread,
Drish realized he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, and
wrestling over that dilemma stole any sleep that might have come.
He left his bed early on and took to pacing his flat instead, until
song birds chirped and the rising sun painted the sky outside his
bay windows in shades of pink. Drish was surprised that the
elemental fury of the blizzard had abated to a lingering squall of
flakes whirling over a still city, but the damage it had wrought
was done, and the world laid smothered beneath a blanket of ice and
snow.

Drish thought about his father, how he had
been so concerned about all the others on the list, but had ignored
his own son’s plight. Now, more than ever, Drish realized he was on
his own. He couldn’t count on his father—not that he really ever
had—nor did he want to. Growing up, Arvis was absent most of the
time anyway, and it was his grandmother who swooped in to mother
his fledgling, noble sensibilities. As to why his father was never
around, even in the
blissful
days of the Unity, was a topic
never discussed, but the sting remained, and fed the pain of the
ex-noble’s convictions. He knew he was going to have to take care
of himself if he wanted to escape this situation, and so Drish
began to formulate a plan that would best free him from this
nightmare.

Extremes came to mind, like suicide, but the
noble didn’t have a gun or poison, and when he held a blade to his
wrist it seemed laughable to think of slashing his own flesh.
Death
was precisely what he was trying to avoid, and he
quickly abandoned any thoughts of self-inflicted murder. So that
left escape, but how?
Run
, but where would he run to—and how
would he run there? Would the insurgency help him? Thinking of
asking those thugs for help was akin to asking his father for help
though, and somehow that seemed worse than death.

So there he was, left without any tangible
plan. If only Domaire had never shown him the accursed list in the
first place, at least then, when the authorities came to arrest
him, they would see sheer ignorance staring back at them.
Befuddlement in that degree would’ve been proof enough of Drish’s
innocence, but Domaire had robbed him even of that. If the Empire
were to question him they’d surely discover he was lying. So then
what? He could tell them he knew about the list… that his inclusion
on it was a simple mistake. Then again, that would bring up the
question of how he came to know about it in the first place, and
then that would implicate Domaire. That was the last thing he
wanted? Or was it? The
last thing
Drish actually wanted was
to be executed, or imprisoned, so in that respect, he didn’t really
care one damn bit about Domaire’s fate.

Suddenly it dawned on him how he would
escape this terrible injustice. It was laughably childish; he would
use the unflinching truth to vindicate himself. It didn’t matter
who he destroyed doing it; it was their own fault anyway. He was
simply in the eye of a great storm of conspiracies and crimes
perpetrated by those around him. He owed those involved nothing;
and if anything, they owed him, for dragging him down into their
nightmare world of violence and intrigue.

Drish sat at his office desk, with the large
bay window to his back, and as the sun rose over the rows of
townhouses and snow-swept streets, he set pen to paper. The noble’s
mind was blank at first, but as the sun’s warmth gently caressed
his shoulders the words began to take form.

‘
To whom it may concern’
, he scrawled
as the morning brightened from pink to orange, and from there on
out both the light and his words only grew bolder. He wrote slowly
and deliberately at first, and then at a rapid pace as his hands
sought to keep up with his internal monologue. The words flowed so
easily that Drish knew he was doing the right thing. He explained
his choice to take the Oath of Allegiance; the falling out with his
father over the matter; his employment at the compound when he’d
proved his worth; his father’s release and how it only renewed
tensions; and finally, how he’d given his father an allowance as a
means to separate their lives. Drish had no idea that the money was
going to the insurgency.

Very soon the rising sun became a blazing strip of righteous
light, caught between the misty horizon and the overhanging blanket
of platinum clouds. Drish wrote his manifesto with furious abandon.
Everything he knew, or suspected he knew, came spilling out over
the page, and very soon he was giving a firsthand account of
Domaire’s betrayal, adding how he’d seen the list, and could prove
it with details: ‘
The parchment is crumbled along the top, and
there is a crease down the middle where it was folded.
’ He went
on to add how it tore on the corner when he took it from the
liaison clerk, and how the last letter of his own name had been
double-tapped by the typist’s typewriter; all of it damning for
those he implicated. As added proof of his loyalty, Drish included
possessing knowledge of where a resistance cell could be located,
and would readily give it up in exchange for immunity. He ended
with:

It is with all my heart that I support the Iron
Empire, and though I know that my implication in these most
sinister events negates any sympathies, I dearly hope that an
understanding can be reached; so that I can live in loyal harmony
with the Empire for the rest of my days as I swore when I took the
Oath.

With unwavering loyalty,

Drish La

A sharp pounding at the door stopped him
before he could finish signing his name, and the quill tumbled from
his hand.

The Empire has come for me.
Outside
the sun had disappeared above the clouds, turning the city gray
with dead light. Cold terror coursed through Drish’s delicate
constitution so fast that when he stood up he swooned, his vision
blacked out, and he vomited over his desk. Another round of
hammering rocked the downstairs door on its hinges and the
terrified noble looked around desperately as drool hung from his
chin.
But for what
… he didn’t know; maybe just something to
hold on to.

The note… the note
. He turned his
gaze on the confession, finding its left corner soaking in putrid
bile, but he swiped it up regardless. It was his only lifeline and
he clutched it tight to his chest; feeling his heart pounding
through it. That’s when Drish heard his downstairs door being
kicked in. Boots stormed in through the foyer soon after, and then
came pounding up the wooden staircase leading to the second floor,
where Drish leaned, quaking, against his desk. There were too many
footfalls to count, it sounded like they’d sent an entire platoon
to arrest him. It seemed excessive, until he remembered he was a
wanted terrorist. They might even shoot him outright if he wasn’t
careful, and so he preventively dropped to his knees, and held up
his hands in surrender.

He never expected there to be laughing when
they arrived.

At some point Drish had closed his eyes,
squeezing them so tightly they hurt, but when he heard the gruff
laughter rolling around him he reluctantly opened them; first one,
and then both. Arrayed throughout the room wasn’t a squad of
imperials, like he’d expected, but instead a foul smelling lot of
what could only be described as savage bandits. Amongst their
numbers was no sign of a single Hierarch soldier, just an endless
hodgepodge of filthy Candarans in greasy leather jackets and
patch-work pants. Drish couldn’t even begin to describe the
disarray of style in which these scofflaws had adorned themselves;
stripes, polka-dots, and plaid patterns (
tartans
of
Glenfindale-make by the looks of them), and all atrociously
mismatched. Several of these men had hair as long as women, a few
had it cropped close to the skull, and one brute in particular; the
size of a bull, and with a face scarred beyond recognition; didn’t
have a strand to be seen anywhere on his waxy, riveted skin.

Drish quaked in terror. “If you’ve come to
rob me, what you see is all that I have. Please…just take it and
go.” Another wave of gruff laughter rippled through the
trespassers, but all Drish could see were the weapons they carried.
Some tried to conceal their guns and sabers beneath the folds of
their coats and jackets, while others didn’t bother with such a
formality in the least.

“Oh, we ain’t here to rob you,” offered a
trim and wolfish looking man, leaning against Drish’s antique
bureau with nonchalant indifference. The sharp-toothed outlaw
appeared to hold more interest in picking at the grime under his
thumbnail then the whole crazy affair playing out in Larken’s
study.