Imprudent: Chapter 11: Losses

What else remains of exo-atmospheric infrastructure and installations is abandoned, inert, or incommunicado. We have found the remains of several lunar cities and bases in a state of partial preservation due to exposure to vacuum, although temperature swings from the day-night cycle have caused significant damage. We have marked several sites in this report’s appendix as worthy of dedicated followup expeditions by specialist archaeological teams.

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Zoy

The snow crunched under Zoy’s feet as they walked through the mostly-empty streets back to the canal. Watching Fia through the corner of her eye, she saw the older woman shooting glances back the way they’d come.

“Worried about being followed?” she prompted, pitching her voice so that the overwinterers they were passing wouldn’t be able to overhear.

Fia turned to her. “Sure. That’s it.”

Yufemya cleared her throat softly. “If I said that I’m sure he’ll be all right, would you believe me?”

“I… don’t know. His father…”

Zoy frowned. “If you want, we could go back, wait for his father to take a nap, and make your man there the Duke.”

Fia laughed bitterly. “Oh, yes, sure, that would work! If stabbing the old monster was the solution, I would have done that already, but it isn’t. If there was any hint of foul play, the King is required to launch an inquiry and then Faalk would be jailed and possibly executed, while his younger brother would inherit, and he’s cast in his father’s mold.”

“Married the black sheep in the family?” Yufemya asked.

“Yeah.”

“I can imagine what that’s like. So, what is your plan for dealing with the old goat? You’re hoping to get the King’s backing when we’re done with this mission. What does that get you?”

Zoy cocked her head. That was a good question.

“Protection, for starters. I was able to hire a few guards specifically for the three of us, but being able to, say, join the King’s court and be under his protection instead, would be helpful. Also, official recognition that I’m still alive. And I could lay attempted murder charges on the Duke. There are enough witnesses that I might be able to win. Sure, my… abilities would get outed, but that would be worth it, especially if he’s forced to step down that way.”

“All of that is assuming that the King honors his word, though,” Yufemya pointed out. They turned a corner onto a nearly-empty street, with only a horse-drawn cart laden with crates visible.

“Yeah. I know. And it’s also political. I know that the Duke has a lot of allies. But if we manage to stop these attacks, the King will owe me, and I can use that.” Fia sighed. “Thankfully this Dormelion princess Faalk was supposed to marry is missing. Wonder what happened to her?”

Zoy blinked and then scoffed. “A Dormelion princess? All the way out here? To a duke? What did she do to get that kind of exile?” In the back of her mind, she considered for a moment trying to figure out which one of the Imperial family was the unlucky bride, but discarded it after a moment. Even when she’d still been living in the Empire, she hadn’t paid much—or really any—attention to their goings-on beyond what it had affected her. She vaguely remembered that there were about twenty or thirty princes and princesses of the blood at the moment. Which, after reflection, might explain why one of them had been offered up for marriage so far from home.

“Beats me,” Fia said. “But if she’s gone missing, then she’s bought me time, so for that I’m grateful and hope she’s all right and hasn’t run afoul of Dormelion politics.”

“Usually they just say that the ‘princess is retiring to an estate’ or something like that,” Zoy commented with a scoff. “If she’s missing, then that’s a whole other thing.”

“You’d know better than I,” Fia commented. “The only times I had to deal with the Empire was boarding their ships and sneaking through the Straits.” She turned to Yufemya as they turned another corner; there wasn’t anyone visible, but cheery light and laughter issued from within a tavern halfway down the block. “You have anything to add?”

She shook her head. “Nothing of any substance that’s believable, sorry.”

“You’re Dormelion too, though.”

“Ah yes, and in an Empire of, what, fifty million souls two thousand miles across, certainly everyone is personally acquainted with the goings-on of the high imperial family? Is that the thought?” She turned to Zoy. “So do you know any of the Imperial Family?”

Zoy smirked. “Once I was in the same room as the Emperor. All the way at the back.” She’d stolen a fair number of purses that day.

Fia scoffed. “Fair enough. And I guess it doesn’t matter. I just want my husband to be safe.”

Glancing at Fia’s sad smile, Zoy couldn’t help herself. “You really love him, don’t you? What’s that like?”

“I… torn gods, how do I even say it? He’s my other half. He makes me smile, he makes me laugh. He reads me terrible romances and sings love songs off-key. He’s my co-conspirator, my partner… he was terrified of the water and trusted me to take him sailing, he… he trusts me, and I trust him.” She smiled. “He’s clever, he’s well-read, well-spoken, a man of integrity…” Her expression grew distant, and Zoy wondered what memory she was reliving. “I would be happy to hang up my pirate hat and sword and just grow old with him.”

Yufemya spoke up. “That sounds wonderful. I hope you can have that.”

Zoy nodded in agreement. Personally, she thought that Fia was a big sap, but it seemed real. Once she would have thought that such a relationship of mutual trust and understanding would have had to be fake, that they would have been a con or something, that anyone who gave a damn about someone else was just setting themselves up to be exploited.

But she’d learned that there was more to existing—to living—that watching for everyone to betray you. That not everyone looked at everyone else to see how they could be used.

“So, where did you meet a necromancer before?” she asked Fia, to change the subject. They were most of the way back to the lock-port inn where the others should be, if she had her bearings down right.

“He was the bonded court necro for the Republic of Ossadu. The First Minister had a scandal that he needed help with—some thieves had absconded with the Jewel of State—and hired me and my crew to help get it back quietly, and sent the necro along both to help and as insurance that we’d return it.” Fia shrugged. “He was a nice enough guy. Kind of fatherly, really, once you got past those robes and the skull on his staff and the rest of it, but let me tell you, I read the terms of that contract with a magnifying glass before I let him bond us to it. And when we were out at sea, I managed to get some details out of him on how necromancy works. Most of it went over my head, though.”

Zoy nodded. “So you trust Oksyna?”

“I do, at least to the point that she wants to find out why these oathwalkers are crossing the border and raising all of this chaos. More than that, we’ll see.”

They continued on, their boots crunching on the ice and snow; as was usual for a wintering city, most of the buildings they passed were dark and silent, but there were still a fair number that were lit, with the sounds of people, or labor, or other activities coming from inside. They passed one where the sound of half-familiar chanting came from inside, making Zoy give it a more thorough look. To her surprise, she saw what she recognized as Daibueri lettering on the sign.

“Now there’s an unfamiliar sight,” she commented, just as they turned the final corner and she stiffened. “Uh oh.” There was a crowd of people—at least thirty, probably more—clustered near where they’d tied up the Lynx. “What do you think? Trap?”

Fia pulled up her scarf to cover her face more thoroughly. “Possibly. Let’s just saunter on over and see. It could be people coming to see the ice-boat that sailed in out of the cold winter and nothing official at all.”

“Do you think so?”

“I’d give it even odds. But let’s be cautious.”

Zoy nodded and palmed a knife, just in case, as the three of them made their way over. It definitely looked like a random crowd of people curious to see the strange new sight that had arrived in the middle of winter—there were people at the edge of the crowd craning their necks to get a look and others eagerly talking to their neighbors. Mostly they were standing on the sideway, although there were at least two men that she could see down in the canal itself looking over the Lynx with interest. It didn’t look like people were looting anything, thankfully…

Uh oh.

Now that they were closer, she could see a man dressed in the same livery as the guard she had stabbed standing guard over the Lynx. There was a bubble of people around him.

“By Stylio’s seat, on the walk,” she muttered.

“I see him.”

“Any idea where Stylio and the others are?”

“Either in the inn or in custody.”

“I think that if they tried taking Oksyna into custody, there would be more damage.”

“Unless she’s lying low.”

“Possibly, but—”

The sound of Stylio’s voice made Zoy relax a hair, and she had to fight a smile as her guardian’s words—in the clipped polite tones of ‘I Am Dealing With Aggravating Officials’—came through the chill air.

“I do not see what the problem is, sir.”

“Where did you say the rest of your party was?” another voice came through the crowd, making Fia tense.

Zoy gave her a sidelong look as Stylio responded. “They are out in the city, but again, I do not see what concern that is of yours. Have we been charged with a crime?”

Fia mouthed a profanity, and Zoy nodded in agreement as Joorgen, the captain of the guard, replied to Stylio. “You have not—yet—been charged, but you have to admit that it is highly suspicious that you and your party arrived in the middle of winter and did not identify yourselves or present yourselves to the proper authorities!”

“I was unaware that traveling in winter was suspicious,” Stylio replied as Zoy followed Fia around the crowd towards where Stylio’s voice was coming from.

“You don’t? Truly? Especially when traveling in such an unprecedented manner?”

Zoy could picture her guardian putting her hands on her hips, and was gratified that her imagination was right when Stylio, with Raavi and Oksyna standing behind her in their winter cloaks, came into view, some guardmen’s lamps casting a yellow glow over their group. The guardsman dressed in the fancy cloak with the big shiny pin was probably Joorgen.

“It’s not unprecedented!” Raavi spoke up, and Zoy had to hide a smile at his energy. “I built it based on descriptions of similar craft from the southern tribes who sail across the equatorial pack ice!”

Zoy bit back a laugh as she watched Joorgen blink and cock his head at Raavi. Even from behind his scarf, the captain's bafflement was clear. Then he shook his head as if to clear it. “You have not paid tolls, nor passage fees, nor docking fees, nor presented authorization! By all rights, I should impound your ‘boat’ in the name of the Duke!”

“You can’t—!” Raavi started to protest, and then he saw Zoy standing there.

Joorgen followed his gaze—and then his eyes widened and his jaw dropped.

Fia sighed and pulled out her sword. “What’s wrong, Joorgen? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

He staggered back, shakily pulling out his own weapon.

Then Raavi shouted, “Oksyna, the lamps!”

Zoy grimaced and covered her eyes as the guardsmen’s lamps essentially exploded into gouts of flame—but then Raavi sang something, and the light vanished.

She squinted to see something delightful—Joorgen and his flanking men were standing embedded in ice that came up to their ankles, with little clouds of fog billowing around their legs. The crowd was pulling back, shouting, leaving the men standing there, unable to move.

Wondering what Fia was going to do, Zoy watched with interest as she stalked towards the men, her sword drawn.

“Well done, Raavi,” she said, not looking away from Joorgen, who was straining, trying to pull his feet from the ice. The guardsman who had been standing by the Lynx drew his weapon but didn’t move.

“We were talking about ideas—”

“Tell me later. First… hello Joorgen. Surprised to see me?”

He stared at her. “Impossible. You’re dead.”

“And how would you know that? Are you admitting to trying to murder the wife of your ducal heir?” she asked sweetly. The crowd was watching, Zoy noticed—albeit at a bit of a further distance—while the guardsman who had been standing over the Lynx was staring at his own weapon as it disintegrated into red flakes of rust in front of his eyes. Fia shook her head. “Come on. We’re leaving.”

“Aren’t you going to kill him?” Zoy asked, surprised. If someone had chopped off her head, she’d return the favor. Well… assuming she could survive getting her head chopped off. It was the principle of the thing.

“That would be murder. He’s not a threat.” She leaned in. “But Joorgen. When I come back, if my daughter has been hurt in any way, I will see to it that you experience the same.” She punched him in the gut, making him gasp and double-over, and then smashed his face with her knee before hauling him upright. “Understood?”

His head wobbled in a vague nod, and she let him go. With his feet frozen to the ground, he couldn’t fall over properly, and he dangled from the waist, half-insensate.

Fia turned. “Come on. Time to go.”

#

Raavi ava Laargan

We were about ten or twenty minutes out from the city when Lady Fia said, “That was a well done Fire Siphon, Raavi.”

I smiled behind my scarf. “Thank you. But without Oksyna breaking the lamps and igniting all of the oil, I wouldn’t have had the heat needed to melt the ice.” My shoulders were twinging from doing the Fire Siphon, but it wasn’t too bad. On the scale of things, it had only been a pint or so of oilsap, and I’d been trained to help put out a fire large enough to melt the contents of an entire crucible. “And she was the one who made the water freeze again.”

“I was only able to do that because of Raavi,” Oksyna said with a… well, I couldn’t call it anything other than a cackle if I was being honest.

“Oh? How so?”

“We were discussing how ice and water and steam work in relation to entropy,” I could hear the smile as she said her new favorite word, “and I can’t make ice melt with my powers because while water has higher disorder to it, you need to add heat to get it to melt.”

“Hence the Fire Siphon,” Stylio said, “which uses Breath and Will to draw heat away from the fire as it breathes and into something else.”

“Exactly. And making water freeze is reducing entropy, so I couldn’t do that either. But…” she drawled, sounding inordinately pleased with herself, “steam is water with high entropy. So after Raavi did the Fire Siphon, I moved all of the heat he’d pushed into the water into steam.”

“Ah! So that’s where that fog came from?” Stylio asked.

I grinned as I steered us around a snow drift that had inched into the canal. “Yep!”

“Great teamwork, you two,” Lady Fia said with a chuckle. “I’m glad you didn’t break Raavi’s brain, Oksyna.”

“It’s a very good brain, I have to say,” she commented, and I felt my cheeks heat behind my scarf.

Scrambling for something to change the topic, I asked, “So… did you see your husband?”

There was a pause, and I glanced back, about to repeat myself, not sure if she’d heard me, just as she replied, “I did. And my daughter. Hopefully dealing with Joorgen won’t cause him problems. But given that Zoy and Yufemya left two dead bodies in the hall, I think he might get suspicious.”

I looked back to the rear of the Lynx and saw Zoy shrug. “It was either stab or let them find Fia in bed with him.”

“Zoy…” Stylio said admonishingly.

“Besides, they were two of the ones who helped chop up Fia in the first place,” Yufemya said.

I cringed and saw Oksyna cock her head, but before I could say anything, Lady Fia barked, “Raavi, eyes forward!”

Whirling back around, I saw a raised fissure in the ice coming up and pulled the tiller to the side; the Lynx tilted alarmingly as our left runner lifted up over the crack, but we didn’t break anything.

We continued on for a while; the canal was filled with drifts and ice cracks along this stretch, and a part of my mind was pondering why. Was it the surrounding topography? That we were getting deeper into the winter and the ice was freezing solid? Maybe the water depth? I wondered if anyone had studied it before. The canals dated back to the Dormelion Empire, so they were several centuries old, there had been plenty of opportunity… but on the other hand, who would have been out here in the middle of winter to study them?

Time seemed to just… drift after a while and my world seemed to shrink, down to the walls and ice of the canal, glowing white under the Night-Light, and the surrounding hills and fields. Trees came and went as darker blobs along the sides of my view. When the first lock appeared, some time later, it was almost a shock. However, we’d gotten practiced by now, and Zoy and Yufemya engaged the brakes as Lady Fia furled the sails.

We came to a smooth halt twenty feet from the canal lock, and looked up.

“How bad is this one?” Stylio asked.

“Pretty bad,” Yufemya said. “According to the map, there are six locks here over the next mile, rising almost three hundred feet.”

I cringed.

“But. If we go cross-country again from here, we can get to another canal in about fifty miles to the north-west, and then it’s less than two hundred miles to the closest canal head by the mountain passes.”

“How far have we come from Rechneesse?”

“About ninety miles.”

“They won’t catch up even if they sent pursuit after us immediately.” Lady Fia hopped out of the Lynx. “Let’s make camp, rest, and tackle this hill afterwards. And then we make for the pass.”

#

Lord Faalk ava Geroold of House Rechneesse

Stoor sleeping in his arms, Faalk pushed his way into his father’s office, flanked by one of his own guards. “Father, this is outrageous!”

His father looked up from his paperwork and frowned. “What is?”

“Two of the guards stabbed each other outside of my suite!” Faalk blustered with as much theatricality as he could manage. “I know that you prefer to keep a full complement of staff awake during the winter, but they are so on edge!”

Duke Rechneesse blinked and then his frown deepened before he set his pen aside and interlaced his fingers, his elbows on his ironwood desk, the pointed dagger of his neatly groomed gray beard nearly brushing his fingers. “We could simply dismiss your guards, if you are so worried. They’re an unnecessary expense, after all.”

“Ah yes, after two of your men murdered each other outside of my rooms from cabin-fever? No thank you, I’ll keep my men,” Faalk said, grateful that Fia had found guards for them. They were a bit… unconventional, but they knew their stuff.

“I see. And why is my granddaughter out of her creche? You’re risking waking her,” the Duke said.

Faalk gently stroked Stoor’s cheek and the reddish hairs on her head. “She’s fine. And after losing Fia… I feel it is best that she remain with me. I’m afraid. I know it’s not rational, but what harm can it do?”

His father’s eyes narrowed, the old man’s craggy skin shifting, but before he could say anything else, another guard came pounding at the door. “Sir! Sir!”

“What is it, man?”

The guardsman—half-melted snow on his shoulders and hat, and a large rust-red stain on one sleeve—came in and saw Faalk standing there. He paused and swallowed. “Uh… Lord Faalk, can I ask you to leave, please? I wouldn’t want to repeat this around your daughter.”

“She’s asleep. Whatever it is that you have to tell my father, you can tell me as well,” Faalk said, trying not to let his worry show too much. Fia had been spotted, he knew it. Of course, the primary question in his mind was the body count…

The fellow looked trapped, and Faalk watched his father’s posture out of the corner of his eye. The Duke was irritated but not angry… so he likely didn’t know that Fia was alive. If he had, he would have been much more agitated.

“Um, uh, all right then, sir.” The guardsman bowed towards the Duke and said, “With your leave sir, of—”

“Just make your report. Now,” the Duke said with a scowl.

“Ah, yes, sir,” the guardsman said, and Faalk took a moment to enjoy the man’s squirming. “Captain Joorgen and his men were assaulted down in the canal-front district by a group of vagabonds who were apparently proficient in Breath. He’s badly injured and we’ve called for the healers.”

Faalk did his best to give an expression of concern for Captain Joorgen’s wellbeing as the Duke scowled. “Is this something to do with this sled that came in earlier?”

“Uh, yes sir. The occupants of it were the ones that assaulted him when he ordered the craft impounded.”

“Then send some of our men after them and arrest them. Their draught animals won’t be able to get too far.”

Faalk considered for a moment volunteering to join the party of pursuers, just to see how the guardsman would react, but the man said, “That… will be difficult, sir. It… had a sail. And it’s quite fast.”

“Huh. Sounds like they won’t be our concern anymore,” Faalk said. “Is the Captain going to be all right?”

“Uh… with the attentions of the healers, I don’t see any reason why he shouldn’t make a full recovery.”

“Good.” Faalk turned back to his father. “Now, as for these two guards that killed each other in the hall…”

He kept arguing with his father over the disposition of the guards, and floated the idea of taking up residence in one of the townhouses away from the manor, with Stoor coming with him and his and Fia’s men securing the place. According to the clock on the wall, it was a full hour later when he finally conceded to his father that he wasn’t going to move out before spring and the arrival of the Dormelion delegation.

Figuring he’d bought Fia and her people enough time, Faalk bowed his head to the Duke. “By your leave, Father, I’ll return to my suite. Thank you for entertaining my concerns.”

“Yes, yes, of course. Dismissed.”

Faalk stepped out of the door and paused before craning his neck, holding Stoor as if he had to adjust his hold on her.

Sure enough, the guardsman didn’t bother to check to see if he was gone before saying, “Sire, there’s a problem. The people who attacked the Captain? The pirate was leading them, and she’s the one who beat him.”

“What? How is that possible?”

Faalk hid a grin and listened as the guardsman described Fia beating Joorgen to a pulp; apparently the man’s knees would need repair after his feet had been frozen to the ground and then he’d been knocked over, and the rust-red stain on the guard’s cloak, which Faalk had taken as blood, was in fact rust… from his weapon having literally dissolved in his hands.

He didn’t know how Fia had managed that, and he was going to have to ask her when he next saw her.

And he was going to see her again.

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