The Trials of Caste (22 page)

Though there were many unanswered questions about
this quest group which would soon be formed, this much he knew; when the time
came to use his training as a warrior, he would not hesitate.  He knew that
their lives would greatly depend on his split second decisions.  Though it
weighed heavily on his mind, he was not a stranger to this responsibility.  In
fact, he quite frequently preached the very same words of strength and
responsibility to his yearlings. 

His yearlings; yes, his yearlings.  He thought of
them as his, and felt as proud of them as their own parents did.  Each one who
had not completed the training hurt his heart.  Despite the low numbers of male
whelps that had been conceived fifteen years before in that year of famine and
drought, and who had then survived the orc raid now six years in the past,
Manebrow would not bow to the pressure some members of the council put on him
to lower his standards.  In his mind, to lower the standard and cheapen the
accomplishment of becoming a warrior would only serve to weaken the gen, and
thereby make their gen an easy target for marauding orcs.  To accept less than
the best into the warrior ranks was to court disaster.

Tired now, Manebrow placed his axe back in the
rack on the cavern wall that their tent was built against.  He carefully
wrapped the sharpening stone in a cleaning rag and placed it in one of the
pouches on his belts.  Checking his equipment one last time, he went back to
bed.  Putting his cares aside for now, he was eventually able to sleep.

The next morning Ki would look upon his gear,
configured now for a trip to somewhere dangerous, and his carefully sharpened
axe, and without a word being spoken she would know that their calm life was
about to be shattered.

D
urik’s
uncle Drok shook him.  “Awaken, young one.  It is time,” his uncle said
quietly.  Durik rolled over and looked glassy eyed at the bright, white form
standing next to his bed; the all too familiar heat signature of his uncle,
standing in the darkness of the cool, black room. 

“Uhn…” Durik muttered as he blinked, still
somewhat groggy from the night’s events, though sleep had washed away the
tension of it all for the moment.

“Hmm… eloquent as usual, I see.”  His uncle
laughed as Durik wiped spittle from his jaw.  “Well, come.  Wake up and come
eat.  It’s going to be a long day, may as well start it.”

Durik grunted and rolled off the cot onto the cool
floor, wincing at the sudden sensation from the cold stone.  He preferred sand,
but he was lucky to have a room at all, much less one to himself.  It was a
luxury few whelps had, and proof of his uncle Drok’s deep affection for his
orphaned nephew and niece.  For six years Durik and his little sister Darya had
lived in their uncle Drok’s tent, ever since the orc raid that had left them
orphaned.  His parents, seeing their escape cut off, had hid him and his sister
under a pile of straw so that the orcs wouldn’t see them.  He could still
remember stumbling over the cold bodies of his parents many hours later after
the orcs had looted the entire cavern area.  He had cried until there were no
more tears to cry.  His little sister had wailed uncontrollably for days. 

Their uncle Drok and his lifemate were childless
and had taken them both in, always treating Durik and Darya as though they were
their own whelps, and the two young kobolds loved them as though they were
their own parents.  To Drok, seeing Durik and his completely bronze scales
reminded him much of his older brother, who like their father had had
completely bronze scales.  The rest of Durik’s grandfather’s descendants, Darya
included, only had bronze tips on their otherwise rust red scales, taking more
after their grandmother who was of Kale Gen descent.

Durik shook the memory of that horrible day from
his fuzzy mind as he stood and stretched.  On the other side of the tent wall,
in the chamber that served as a kitchen and living area for his uncle’s family,
he could see the bright light of a small fire starting.  Quickly he put on a
fresh loincloth and his belt, and pushed aside the flap door into the living
area.  Karial, his uncle’s lifemate, was tending to the fire.  Durik sat down
and watched as she took a large chunk of shelf fungus and broke it into smaller
pieces, throwing them one at a time into a small copper pot full of water. 
Durik watched for a minute, then stood up and stretched, shaking out his arms
and legs, getting his blood flowing as he thought about the day’s events. 
After a minute, his uncle returned through another flap in the wall of the
living area tent, followed by a still very sleepy young female. 

“Do they have to start so early?  The first gong
hasn’t even sounded,” complained the young kobold, hiding her muzzle deeper in
the blanket she had wrapped around herself.  “I’m still sleepy.”

“Good morning, Darya!” Durik said with a sudden
burst of energy.  “How’s my little sister this day?”

She looked at him with a sleepy grimace, which
turned slowly into a smile.  “Not so little any more!  If we’re going to get up
this early, you better take the cup!”

Durik laughed.  “Just for you, little sister. 
Just for you.  Now, come, sit next to me and tell me about this whelp I’ve seen
you with out in the meadow in the evenings,” Durik joked.

Together they sat and ate shelf mushroom stew and
talked of life.  When they finished Durik stood, gathered his equipment from
his chamber and joked that Darya wouldn’t even know how he’d done, being too
busy watching Keryak. 

Darya didn’t answer.  Instead she blushed and
waved goodbye, her eyes gleaming with love and hope.

Lord Karthan sat groggily looking at the bowl of
roots, tubers, and stewed meat that a servant had placed on the table in his personal
chambers.  As his mind came into more full alertness, he wrestled it away from
thoughts of insurrection to the task at hand for the day; the Trials of Caste.

Lord Karthan had never had to undergo the trials. 
He had been born into his position as the only son of his father, then lord of
the gen.  Not having undergone the trials did not mean that he was a stranger
to hard training and discipline, however.  For many generations, the eldest son
of a council member had the right to take his father’s place on the council. 
This tradition was deeply set and was only broken when there was no son to take
his father’s place.  This had given the leader caste the opportunity to slacken
in the training of their whelps.  It had made them weak and left them unchallenged.

Lord Karthan’s father had set a standard among the
leader caste when he had made a position for an elite warrior trainer for the whelps
of the twenty four council members who were the leader caste and forced their
first sons to undergo two years of combat training, which was above what all
the other sons of the leader caste or the common castes had to endure.  Young
Karthan had been in the first group to enter the training. 

If there was one thing his father had tried to
pound into his head, it was that you can’t lead someone where you aren’t
willing to go yourself.  So, he had forced young Karthan to lead the way and
thereby guaranteed, through his son, that this change in culture for the leader
caste would remain long after his son took charge of the gen.

Before he had died, Lord Karthan’s father had
taken this path to its logical conclusion.  He had taken away the special
status of the leader caste’s whelps, making all males in the gen undergo the
Trials of Caste.  He then began replacing council members as they died with
elite warriors, breaking the walls down between the castes, making promotion to
the leader caste merit based.  It was scandalous and after a full generation
the echoes of that controversy still resonated among some.  But by the time
young Karthan became Lord of the Gen in his father’s place, it was a stable,
perhaps even well established tradition.  Young Lord Karthan had made the
mistake of not following that precedence once, however, as Khee-lar Shadow Hand
had become leader caste by being the younger brother of Lord Karthan’s lifemate,
an action that Lord Karthan had come to regret.

Lord Karthan looked back on his younger days with
mixed emotions.  They were simpler days, that much was true, but they were also
times of much turmoil in his life as he struggled to come to grips with who he
was and who he wanted to become.  The events of his life had defined him; two
years of training, the joining to his lifemate Kiri, killed six years ago now
in the orc raid, the birth of their whelps Kiria, barely fifteen, and their two
much younger sons, Karto and Lat, and the pressures and stress that accompanied
his position as lord of the gen.

After six years, and much speculation about who
would take Kiri’s place, Lord Karthan remained unmated.  This did not mean that
he had ceased to care about family life.  The lessons he had learned in their
union, and the lessons he continued to learn through being a father, helped
define his character as he sought to build a better future not only for his whelps,
but for all who would work with him to ensure the future of their gen.

Now more than fifteen years after becoming Lord of
the Kale Gen, Lord Karthan felt that he knew himself well and, more than that,
he felt that he had finally gotten to a point where he was fully comfortable
with the direction that he was taking the gen and with the laws and traditions
that he had instituted.  Yes, there had been and continued to be insurrection,
but he had hopes that the gen would get past it.  Perhaps, he mused optimistically,
the infiltrator’s failed assassination attempt and Trelkar’s self-imposed exile
would end the insurrection that was brewing, and there would be no more during
his rule.  He wasn’t counting on it, however, and had already made plans to
safeguard his family again.  After all, he didn’t have the Kale Stone yet, and
so the insurrections would go on, for his were a fractious people.

The more he thought about it, his decision to give
the yearlings the quest to find the Kale Stone seemed more and more to fit into
the direction he had set for the gen.  Indeed, he was quite happy with himself
for having made that decision despite the further divisions it had caused among
the council members.

Finishing the stew, Lord Karthan soon exited his
room and saw that all was in order, despite the tired eyes of many of his
warriors.  Not long after, Lord Karthan left for the arena, flanked by Khazak
Mail Fist and a contingent of the warriors of his bodyguard.  Knowing the
treachery that was afoot, the guards formed something of a perimeter around
their lord, his still somewhat sleepy daughter Kiria, and his two overly
excited young sons, Karto and Lat.

Kyro grumbled as he pulled the cart through the
next patch of sand, helped only nominally by the handful of elite warriors from
his warrior group.  They may have been dressed as servant caste for some reason
or another, but as the only true servant caste in the group they seemed content
to let him struggle with the cart mostly by himself.

“Come on, now, put your back into it.”  The new
elite warrior whom he’d not seen before this morning looked at him struggling
with the cart and instead of helping decided to offer useless advice.  But Kyro
was a servant caste, and so was careful not to let too much of his frustration
show.

Behind him in the cart the large barrel full of wooden
weapons for the Trials of Caste rolled from one side of the cart to the other,
knocking the cart and Kyro about with its sudden shift. 

“Ah, here, you two,” the new elite warrior said,
waving at a couple of the other elite warriors, both of which were dressed as
servant caste as well.  “Help this lesser caste,” he said condescendingly.

Kyro grimaced and pushed, helped suddenly past
that patch of sand then left to push by himself along the flat area of stone
beyond it.  
My son Keryak better not be as arrogant as these idiots
, he
thought, not daring to say such a thing out loud. 

“Hurry up!” the new elite warrior urged between
gritted teeth.  Behind Kyro a couple of the elite warriors apparently figured
out that Kyro pushing a cart alone simply could not move as fast as the rest of
the group, which carried nothing.  Suddenly Kyro felt them put their weight
into pushing the cart along as well.

Kyro wondered why the charade; all this just to
deliver a barrel of sticks?  And these sticks were obviously of inferior
quality.  Kyro couldn’t imagine that the trainers would do anything but ignore
this barrel full of practice weapons…

Sighing, Kyro pushed until they came to the arena
doors, open now and guarded by a couple of warriors from Lord Karthan’s Honor
Guard Warrior Group.

“Barrel of practice weapons for the arena,” the
new elite warrior said.  The pair of warriors waved the group in without any
further inspection.  Once inside they all pushed the cart along through the
hard-packed sand of the lower chambers, eventually coming out into the arena.

All about the scouting competition part of the
arena various warriors and servant caste from the Honor Guard were putting keys
into obstacles, starting up fires to burn the chemicals two of the obstacles
required, and conducting final checks on the ropes and ladders that the
yearlings would soon be climbing.

“Over there, just under the trainers’ stand,” the
new elite warrior commanded.

As one, the entire group pushed the wagon through
the sand until they reached the base of the trainers’ stand.  Offloading the
weapons barrel with a heave, they stood for a moment breathing hard and
observing the rest of the arena, all except for Kyro who stood looking at the
odd assortment of warped sticks in the barrel that seemed very heavy for what
it contained.