Aethosphere Chronicles: Storm of Chains (16 page)

It proved too much to look upon a moment
longer, and Drish tucked it back away. “Thank you,” he said
stiffly, sliding the pack up over his arm. Beyond that, Drish had
little else to say. All the events of the past couple days had
shaken him to the core. Everything felt topsy-turvy inside, like he
were a freshman once more attending the Royal University, and
trying to find his place in it all.

The survivors walked for some time through
the dark, winding passages of the sewer, leaving behind the main
line, where the fallen bodies of Candarans and Hierarchs alike lay
in the filth of King’s Isle. Each twist and turn of their journey
seemed to take them deeper into this underground world, where the
structures became progressively older. Soon, the smell of sewage
was replaced by a far-older musk of clay and dirt, and the walls
changed to cut stone; gray, and with some of it so old it had
crumbled to pebbles, exposing the raw earth beneath.

“Listen, I wanted to thank you for coming
back to rescue me,” said Drish, breaking the silence that overcome
them all for the past hour.

“It was—” Abigail started to say, but Bar
Bazzon quickly interrupted.

“A wasted effort,” he said. His voice
strained. He appeared barely able to contain some strong emotion
buried beneath the surface.

“What’s your meaning, Bar,” snapped Abigail,
herself bordering on anger, and up ahead, Portman and the remaining
men stopped.

Drish scowled at the perceived injustice of
the pirate’s resentment, until he spotted the blood encrusted note
clenched in the pirate captain’s fist, then his face fell and his
heart took to crashing against his chest. It was the confession
letter he’d written to the Empire.

“I’ve tried to rationalize this for the past
hour,” snarled the captain, “reading and rereading and trying to
understand…but I can’t. So would you care to explain it?”

“What have you got there, Bar?” Portman
asked, but the captain’s seething glare remained fixed on the
noble.

Drish stood in helpless silence. It seemed
like he’d written that note a hundred years ago; he wasn’t even
sure he was the same man.
So much has happened. How can Bar hold
it against me now? It’s ridiculous; irrelevant and vastly out of
context
. “That… I wrote it days ago, before all of this
happened,” he tried to justify.

“What is it,” asked Abigail with dark
curiosity.

“Maybe Drish would like to explain it, seems
he’s pretty good at rationalizations.”

“Abigail, it’s nothing,” he tried to
deflect, chuckling dryly as if it were all a joke, “A
misunderstanding,” and yet he found himself backing towards the
wall in fear just the same. Seeing that beautiful woman, the one
he’d given his heart over to, probing him with those large doleful
eyes of hers, stirred his guilt.

The captain retorted with a burst of mocking
laughter. “Nothing, he says… fitting coming straight from the lips
of a treacherous, collaborating, lying piece of
filth
such
as you.” The captain took two menacing steps towards Drish.

The guilty noble tried to retreat, but found
himself trapped when his back hit the cold stone of the wall.
Portman, Lance, Fen, O’Dylan, Gryph; each of those leftover men
looked at him darkly, as though any one of them might attack him at
the drop of a hat.

Nowhere to go.

Abigail stepped between the pirates and the
collaborator. Her face twisted into conflicting emotions, seeming
to be angry at Bar, but also concerned and puzzled. “Would someone
mind explaining to me just what the hell is going on here between
the two of you?”

Without taking his predatory eyes off the
treacherous aristocrat, Bar snapped, “See for yourself, Abby,” and
then he extended her the note.

“No,” said the panicked noble, trying to
reach for the letter, but Bar flashed forward and cuffed him hard
across the face.

“Do you have any idea how much we risked
coming back for you…? We went to Port Armageddon!” The pirate bared
his teeth like a wolf, and for a moment, Drish thought he might
lunge and latch onto his throat. “Rook…Tanner, Hallsbjorn—countless
others—they all died for you! For nothing! Your own father, Drish!
Gods, I could shoot you right here myself.” The pirate drew his
gun.

“Bar!” yelled Abigail furiously. The others
closed in while Drish cupped his bleeding nose. “What’s gotten into
you?”

“Read the damn letter!”

Powerless, terrified, Drish watched the
woman snatch the damning letter away from the captain, angry with
him at first, until her eyes began to race over the hand-scrawled
words. Her expression changed from anger, to shock, and then to
despair. She looked at up to Drish with her tear-filled eyes,
pleading for it not to be so.

“You have to understand,” whispered the
noble, and that’s when he saw the change; the moment her love for
him turned to loathing; when her saffron eyes became overflowing
with hate.

“Someone mind explaining what’s on that
letter that’s got you all so bothered.” Portman maneuvered his
imposing form into the gathering. Abigail merely held the note at
arm’s length and the resistance leader gingerly plucked it from her
fingers.

In a last ditch moment of desperation, Drish
tried to explain himself as Portman read through the document. “I
was only trying to survive,” he spoke desperately, “That was before
any of this; when it was just me against the world. I’ve changed…”
And it was true. Everything
had
changed. Abigail had come
into his life and made him want to be a better man. “You changed
me, Abby. You must realize I had no intention of actually handing
that over to the Empire. We can move past this; leave it all behind
and start fresh somewhere else.”

“…Signed, Drish,” Portman finished reading,
and then spat at the noble’s feet. “Worthless traitor.” The note
slipped from his hands and fluttered to the wet ground, but Drish
didn’t care. His eyes were on Abigail’s back, and it seemed she
might be crying the way she trembled.

“Oh, Drish…” her voice echoed in sad
disappointment, but it was the click of Bar’s gun-hammer that made
the most compelling counterargument.

“Do what you will,” said Portman turning
away and motioning to his men, “He’s not welcome, and I wash my
hands of this filth.”

It was all more than the noble could bear.
He was being strangled by a storm of chains not of his making. But
instead of despairing, he found anger burning white-hot through his
soul. He gingerly placed the pack containing his father’s wine upon
the floor, before he took off his glasses and set to polishing the
lenses with the sleeve of his cotton shirt. “You people think
everything is so simple,” he said with a throaty husk, and all eyes
fell on him, “you all think it’s so cut-and-dry; black and white.
We’re Ascellans and they’re imperials, and now we must fight to the
death, even if it’s a hopeless cause…especially because it’s a
hopeless cause—because then that somehow makes you even more in the
right. So let’s go ahead, let’s burn down our own homes; bomb our
own markets; kill our own people to drive them away. Let’s consign
ourselves to light the torch of misery with our own bodies and burn
forever in our damnable pride; let’s just roast away in the
lamentable fires of our former glory!

“Well, you simply fail to grasp the
complexities of the real world, the shifting tide of politics.
Nations rise and fall…but do you know why humanity persists,
because we hunker down and we create a life for ourselves in the
ashes. Not everyone wants to fight in the trenches for an
idea
, for the abstract notion of freedom and self-rule—for
impossible restoration. Time refuses to move backwards like that!
Some of us just want to move on and live out our lives the best we
can! So yeah, when the Iron Empire gave me the opportunity to pick
up the pieces and move on with
my
life, I took it—and
gladly! We should’ve all counted ourselves lucky to find this offer
lying before us. You fight for the UKA,” he scoffed bitterly. “Well
the UKA is long gone! But I’m not… I’m right here, I’m alive,
Abigail, and so are you! And that’s what I fight for!”

There was a silence that pervaded the tunnel
after Drish had finished, the ghosts of his words hanging on the
ancient stone. Pirate and insurgent had backed away, Abigail had
refused to look at him, and Bar stood frozen with his gun pointed
shakily at the traitor. If anything of what Drish had said made any
impact, he wasn’t sure, but he felt hot and flustered, full of
anger and sadness and emptiness towards them all. They just didn’t
seem to understand how this whole stupid situation was a travesty
flying in the face of civilized sensibility. If the war had never
happened he would still be living a life of privilege, the captain
would still be in the Royal Air Navy, and Abigail would…

“Abigail,” Drish let his voice carry gently
through the twilight. “May I ask what you did before the war?”

There was a long pause before the girl
finally answered in soft whisper, “I was a wife and a mother.” And
then she turned.

The crack of the pistol was startling in the
small space, even after all the gun battles Drish had been
witnessed to during his brief time as a fugitive. Maybe this one
was much more poignant because it was the one that laid a claim to
his life.

He knew he was shot, and not because he felt
the pain—that would come seconds later—but because he saw the
smoking gun held in Abigail’s hand, and that barrel was pointed at
his stomach. There was nowhere else for the bullet to go. When he
placed his hands to his vest he was greeted by the feel of warm and
sticky fluid. When he pulled them away again he gasped at the sight
of his own blood. It appeared blackened and corrupt in the
strangled torchlight as it stained his fingers, coursed down his
vest, and pattered to the stone floor in teardrops of red. Drish
had once heard a doctor say—at some royal court gathering—that
wounds to the liver always produced the darkest blood; and that
wounds like that were almost always fatal.

Drish stared imploringly at the girl
standing in front of him. “You… you’ve murdered me,” he accused
softly, and then he fell to the ground as the pain crippled his
ability to stand.

“I’m done here,” said Abigail without
remorse, then she turned to join Portman and his men.

There was satisfaction in the old fighter’s
face as he took her in and wrapped an arm around the girl in
approval. “I suppose you’ll be going back to your ship now,
Captain,” he called to Bar, but by then Drish had begun to slip
into the waiting hands of death, and the pirate’s reply come out as
a monosyllabic murmur.

Rapidly, the world lost context and meaning,
and time became a thing without reference. In a flash, Drish’s
love—Drish’s executioner—vanished, and yet the sound of her heels
clacking off the stonework seemed to linger for hours. Somewhere in
the moments in between, Drish heard Fen talking; his words seeming
to move in time with the flicking torchlight. “Why are we still
standing around here, Cap? We should get back to the ship.”

It seemed the pirate leader sighed over his
words—or maybe it was the wind—either way it was a sound like the
beating wings of a reaper come to claim Drish’s spirit in the name
of Nekros. “I just can’t leave him here to die,” the man’s voice
faded in and out as he spoke.

“And why not? You said yourself he’s a
traitor.”

“He is…to us, but I think in his own
warped-sort-of-way, he isn’t. You’re young…you may not understand,
but I think I do now. There are complexities that govern every
man’s actions, creating differing standards of right and wrong… I
should know that better than anyone; and sometimes there’s just no
real moral high-ground to stand on. I’m not saying I condone his
actions, but we’re not perfect creatures, lad, and events are never
perfectly scripted… And besides…I made a promise to a friend, and I
aim on keeping that promise.”

A promise
? Drish didn’t remember Bar
making him any sort of promise, but as he tried to reason through
what he might have been talking about, darkness came creeping over
to swallow him whole.

It was some time later that Drish awoke to a
relentless thumping coming from deep in the earth. At first he
wasn’t sure if he was dead or alive; if maybe he’d awoken in the
Pantheons’ Halls of Judgment; where Nekros, The God of Death, was
in waiting, to weigh his soul and decide his afterlife. But a
ruthless thirst had turned the noble’s mouth to sand and hinted
that he might actually be alive after all. He tried to move, but
only his head seemed inclined, lulling uselessly, and sending a
spasm of deep pain coursing up through his neck. He attempted to
sit up as the pain faded, but found his guts on fire as well. Only
when he consigned himself to lie absolutely still did he feel any
sort of tenuous grasp on relief.

Drish quickly realized he was no longer in
the stone aqueduct, where Abigail had shot him, but was instead in
some sort of room; an infirmary of sorts based on the beds and
curtains surrounding him, but there were no windows to speak of and
the unembellished room was small and constructed of wood, with only
a scant collection of gas lamps to light it. On a nearby bench sat
the backpack Abigail had given to him; containing the last token of
his father—the bottle of Coronation Wine—but he wondered if it was
still in there.

Did Abigail take it after she shot
me?
Though something told him she’d left it.
Why else would
the pack be here now?
But he turned his head; couldn’t bear the
sight of it any longer.
Best to throw it into the mists when I’m
well enough to walk out of here—but where is here?

It was only when the whole room gently
swayed beneath him that he finally realized he was on an airship.
The relentless thumping he heard must have been that of a steam
engine running somewhere nearby. But again, where was here?
Whose airship am I on?