The Beggar’s Journey – Prologue II

(~1K words)

A man in a segmented black cuirass approached, stiff-backed and square-chinned.

“Your majesty?”

“Fexin. Lynceus waits below, escort him to the parlor immediately.”

“The Sword of the King is… downstairs?”

Finishing what remained of his wine, Callius shook his head. “The Noble from Nothing is downstairs, the Sword of the King stands before me bearing the livery of his majesty but -for reasons unknown- not his message.”

Fexin’s jaw tightened. “Apologies, my King. Right away.”

Callius clapped one of Fexin’s black pauldrons, set his empty cup of wine on a felted seat and watched the guard set out. Once Fexin had left the room, Callius snorted. Even at the rim of the world, atop the tower of his ancestors, in the very room where the fate of Empires past and present had been weighed, King Nisodon, thirteenth of his line, could not avoid the shadows of his past. He would not let it bother him. These were the burdens of a King, the cost of choices made for good and ill. You shot your agate like an arrow and let the spheres scatter where they would. And if this particular sphere -warped though it might be- was still rolling, well, Callius figured, such was the unavoidable consequence of shooting at all.

He sighed. As a child, he had loved the Beggar’s Journey, had reveled in it, in fact. It had taken him out of the tower and brought him to his people, and through it he had seen things few men and women could ever dream of. He had enjoyed those early days when he had been too naive to understand its purpose. The danger, the profiteering, the death. Twenty three seasons later and he had gotten more than his fill. What once he had welcomed, he now reviled, and if there was a curse greater than his forced participation, it was his hand in it’s heralding.

A tapping sounded behind him followed by the patter of leather feet on spiraled stone steps. Finding the task more tolerable because he could track its end in a sandglass, King Nisodon bit back against the cold and the shiver that threatened to follow.

“Whose boon is this? Mine or yours!?” Called a voice from the parlor’s entrance.

Being right was rarely so upsetting and King Nisodon groaned into his empty cup. He took a moment to compose himself, then turned to the man with a smile. “Aeras be praised, is that the Hero of the Bloat?”

Tall and lean, Lynceus had a jaw to rival Fexin’s. Throwing his arms out wide, the man crossed the room and embraced Callius like an old friend.

“Is this what I think it is?”

Callius nodded in answer.

Clapping his hands together, Lynceus strode past the King as though he were an afterthought, looking out through the carved pillars and down on Aerodin with a satisfied smile.

The Noble from Nothing was as ostentatious as ever. He wore crisp leather boots and a black silk cloak that billowed out behind him as he stood at the parlor’s edge, the roughly stitched outline of the Rolling Gyre, a five spoked wheel and the sigil of the Beggar’s Journey, emblazoned on the back of the cloak in yellow. A clever re-appropriation of the sigil using the colors of the Aerodin Empire. Curiously, while the stitching of the Gyre had been masterfully tailored, the template he’d used to craft it looked as though it had been scribbled out by a child. Callius could only marvel at the man’s effortless knack for turning a crowd. Lynceus had taken the sigil’s lowest form and spun it in black silk and gold leaf, reinforcing his ties to the Empire and endearing himself to Nobles and commoners alike in the process. It was a talent Lynceus had long possessed.

Callius watched as the Noble from Nothing pondered his return to relevance, intending for the man come to his manners in his own time.

It was asking too much.

“I’ve stayed up many a late night thinking about this and I’ve come to a decision. We’ll do away with the leaflets entirely and double or even triple the amount of Criers lining the King’s Road. There is something… ephemeral about the spoken word, about feeling and rumor passed from one mouth to another. They grow with time, changing and expanding as the original words are lost, forgotten, and reinterpreted. The leaflets…” Lynceus shook his head, not truly seeing the King nor the city stretched out below him. “…where is the space to breathe in a rote list? The room for rumor? The margin for mystery? What surprises can be had by words that never change no matter how many times you read them?”

King Nisodon knew full well that Lynceus’s resentment towards the written word came in the hang-ups that arose when those words were called back to account. Uncatalogued, words could be moved, reshaped, denied, or created at will, while those set to ink and parchment could be called back, disruptive and inconvenient.

“And why must I remain limited to a single announcement in Aeras Square? Where is the sense in that? The Bloat is large, to be sure, and yet it is only a single locality in a city with many. There should be another on the Kingsway at the very least, and a third on Cloudstep for the Blooded Nobles!”

King Nisodon shook his head. Left unchecked, the man would talk well into the evening. “Are those formal requests?”