Chapter 18

The muddy and rutted forest road heading west towards Aston seemed that much colder, that much lonelier without Sasaki to keep Katarina company. The trees crowded the edges of the road, branches hanging down, laden with moisture. Fortunately for her, it seemed that the last furious thunderstorm in Higgenfal had been the spring weather venting the last of its spleen. The clouds even occasionally broke up every day, letting sunlight through.

Katarina squeezed her legs involuntarily, causing her horse to stop as she spotted something in the road. She urged her horse forward a few steps and let out a short breath in realization. She was staring at a small footprint, the kind Sasaki made with her odd-looking sandals. So she had come through here.

"Not unexpected." She murmured to herself. Sasaki had gone on ahead of her.

She urged her horse forward, trying not to notice Sasaki’s tracks, unable to avoid noticing them anyway. Katarina was slow to make friends, but she missed the smaller woman regardless.

She’d met the Yamato mercenary in Higgenfal, a tiny logging town they’d both coincidentally arrived in just as the spring storms cranked up. They’d joined forces and cleared out a nest of mutants and a Witch, a rogue mage that had fled the Church. Katarina had been so impressed with Sasaki she’d done something she’d never done before; she’d offered to take Sasaki as her apprentice, an offer Sasaki had declined.

So Katarina travelled down the road Sasaki had gone down already, mulling over Sasaki’s passing words, aware on some level that she was not more than an hour or so behind the Yamato woman and gaining ground quickly. Sasaki was on foot and refused to travel on horseback, while Katarina rode a horse bred for its speed and endurance.

It would only be a matter of time before she caught up. How should she react upon seeing the smaller woman? What sort of greeting would they exchange?

Katarina raised an eyebrow. On the northern side of the road was a weathered sign, its words faded to illegibility. She noticed Sasaki’s footsteps approached the sign, and then appeared to vanish.

She rode up to the sign and her eyebrows lifted. There was a path leading off the road, somewhat overgrown with vegetation. She eyed the sign’s disrepair, and then considered the path that split off from the road she’d been following, the road she’d been told would take her down to the coastal city of Aston.

The path was overgrown and looked like it hadn’t been maintained for some time. She eyed the vegetation and guessed it had been anywhere between three and perhaps ten years since it had been used. Sasaki had headed for it, however, and that piqued Katarina’s own curiosity. She nudged her horse, and pushed her way through the plants and saplings.

The path was mercifully short, and opened up immediately into a small village that ringed an open green. The village itself was rapidly disappearing into the forest. Whatever village had been here, it was abandoned. The buildings sagged disconsolately, moss growing on the logs. Doors stood ajar or were missing altogether. She circled the green, and spotted tracks pressed in the boardwalk, deep gouges in the wood. She dismounted and touched the tracks, which were just impressions in the planking.

"Centaurs." She decided after a moment’s consideration. Centaur tracks differed from horse tracks, and besides, there was no cause for someone to ride a horse up onto the boardwalk.

Even though the beastman attack had occurred long ago, Katarina still loosened her sword in her scabbard, and checked to make sure her gun was clear in its holster. It was still stiff and gritty no matter how often or how thoroughly she cleaned it, but she was certain she could get a few shots out of it before it needed to be serviced by a proper gunsmith.

She mounted her horse and continued her circuit, noting that Sasaki’s tracks picked out an almost exact route that Katarina had picked.

She approached a tumbled-down pile of logs and planking, and, spotting Sasaki’s footsteps, followed them around the side. Sasaki had stopped here. Katarina eyed the sunken impression of the small footsteps and snorted laughter. Sasaki had taken a necessary here. There wasn’t any other reason for the woman to squat down like that, except- she paused in thought, eyeing the timbers, and swung down from her horse. Sasaki might not have had a necessary here. She squatted to see something better, Katarina surmised, and hunkered down, herself.

Katarina nodded. Under a shattered beam was a wood carving of the Lily of Spring. The toppled building had been this villages’ church. Katarina rose from her crouch, idly massaging her lower back, and followed Sasaki’s tracks around to the back of the building, where traditionally the grave markers would be.

Katarina raised her eyebrow at the rows of markers, and thumbed her chin in thought. Centaurs attacked the village and had either left or been driven off... and then someone had come and raised enough markers for everyone in a village this size. Certainly not the centaurs. Beastmen were often cannibals, eating the dead. They would not raise markers for human villagers. Someone had to have come back.

"Okay, Katarina." She began. "Centaurs attacked the village. They rampage around a bit, desecrate the church. They kill and rape and plunder what they can, and fuck off somewhere else." She nodded to herself as she speculated. "Then someone comes by and buries the victims. Who?"

She mounted her horse. "Maybe a woodsman comes back to town after felling some trees and discovers the town in shambles. He cremates his fallen kin, raises markers, and... then what? Fucks off down the road to Aston?" She offered, and then shook her head. "Thin. Too thin. Not a woodsman." She rubbed her chin and tapped her finger against her lips as she constructed several scenarios in her mind as she headed back to the green.

She glanced up at the sky and something caught her eye. Off to the side, back behind the trees and pushed up against a hillock was the rotting beams that presaged a mine entrance.

"Mining town." She observed. "A miner could have the strength to drag all the bodies, hack up wood, cremate them, and raise markers for them." She offered, but shook her head.

"Forest Wardens." She raised a finger self-importantly, and nodded. "A forest Warden... or a patrol of them find the village fucked up. They perform rites and move on. Now that makes sense." She wheeled her horse back towards the cemetery and rode through it carefully.

The markers were wooden, and time and weather had obliterated any trace of identification. Regardless if it was a villager or a Warden, it was likely the person that had done it was illiterate. Her mouth twisted irritably. Whoever had done this should have left some sign, some indication of who it had been. She wheeled her horse back around, and headed back to the road that would lead her on to Aston.

After weeks of seeing the horizon heaving up and down, after endless days of the same beans and bacon, bacon and beans, after countless hours listening to the alarming groans and creaks of protest from the spars and beams and planks of the ship, after long days and even longer nights of endless rain sheeting down the stairs and puddling and pooling everywhere, mornings wrapped in fog, discreetly emptying the chipped chamber pot out the side of the boat, the seemingly perpetual clouds parted like heavy curtains revealing the harbor gate of Darnell, the capital of the Anglish Empire.

The harbor was gargantuan, titanic, the apotheosis of harbors. Two massive towers carved in the likeness of legendary saints braced the harbor mouth and soared into the sky, the raised hands of the saints reaching out to each other across the broad gap.

A bridge reached across the towers, a massive thing that was broad enough to support three coaches riding side by side, reaching up from the shoulders of the carved saints and arching between the two of them. Anchored from the centerpoint of the bridge was the Blessed Saint Celestine, her broad wings wrought in golden marble, the legendary Galatine, her blessed sword at her waist. She smiled beatifically down at those that passed under the massive harbor gate, while the lesser Saints on the towers vainly reached for her.

Armilla misted up when her ship passed under the gate and Celestine’s carved gaze fell upon her. It seemed filled with infinite patience, infinite compassion, unlimited understanding. Armilla was awed and humbled by the artistic detail. All her trials and travails seemed to fade away under that gaze as trivial, silly things, vapors and megrims. Her heart ached and tears filled her eyes.

Beyond the gate, the actual harbor of Darnell was filled with ships, a veritable forest of masts from every type of ship imaginable: from the fastest clipper to the ponderous freighter to the stark and unrelieved white of the warships of the Holy Church. Armilla saw the hungry-looking Blackwall frigates that were built in her home country, she saw a Toledo galleon, bulbous and massive, and a pair of Lyonesse Temeraires idled, their seventy-four gun ports closed.

Beyond the harbor itself, the grand capital of the Anglish Empire itself, Darnell. Despite being told of the place, stories did not do the capital justice. It was huge, titanic, megalithic. Her own vocabulary lacked the words to describe its sheer size and bulk and overwhelming majesty. Building upon building, bridges and archways all fairly glowing with reflected light, and over them all, the spires of the Grand Cathedral.

The sky was bright, clear, and hard as Armilla’s ship docked, the air dryer than she was used, crisp and sharp and edged with cold. She hailed from Blackwall, a small forested country across the Mirras Sea that manufactured the frigates she spied earlier, and the difference in the air between the two places was palpable. There was much less humidity, and as spring blossomed it was much cooler than her home country.

As the gangplanks thudded down and passengers and cargo began disembarking, Armilla was suddenly awash with a myriad of emotions. There was a palpable sense of relief of course; travelling by ship was a wholly unwholesome affair. Luckily she’d had the grace to be privately sick in her cabin, rather than hanging embarrassedly over the gunwales voiding her stomach into the spray.

There was a sense of melancholic homesickness; already she missed the deep, earthy scents of the woods. She was a warrior however, and warriors sworn to the Church of the Golden Lady received their anointing as knights in the grand city of Darnell, the capital of the Empire, and home to the Garrison, the legendary fighting school that trained the best warriors.

There weren’t many women that were called to be fighters, however every one that had been called had become the stuff of legends. Alicia, Katherine, Celestine; all formidable warriors, all canonised as Saints of the Church. Even the paladin trainer Nadette, while not a Saint, had stories of her exploits shared and reshared around the five great continents of the Empire.

Armilla was looking forward to Nadette’s tutelage. Two things were required for a Knight-Errant to win their spurs and take the rank of Paladin: a noble sponsor, and consecration by the Church. While Armilla had finally gained sponsorship, she’d yet been consecrated to the Church, a ceremony that could only take place within the Alstroemeria, the Grand Cathedral of Darnell.

She’d allowed herself the freedom to gawk at everything as the boat pulled into the docks, but when the gangplanks were set, she collected her few belongings and marched towards the passenger gangplank with her head up and her eyes straight. While the vast city was carved from stone and the buildings were covered in all sorts of ornamental sculptures and bas reliefs, the docks were crowded wooden buildings, and the people there were surly and rowdy and cursed at each other with clenched teeth and hairy fists. She knew what the price for gawking like a naive country rube would be.

Down on the docks there was a detachment of twenty soldiers, all in the livery of the Church, with polished golden armor, crimson tabards, and the Lily of the Goddess of the Dawn emblazoned on their shields. They stood stiffly at attention in four rows of five while a woman in the officious robes of the church consulted a scroll nearby. Armilla examined them with a longing eye. Warriors raised by the Church were trained by the absolute best to be the absolute best, and from childhood, no less. There were never worries about gear, or hunger, or finding sponsors. She snorted at that. They also had no problem with being taken seriously. How much time had she spent struggling and fighting to prove herself competent?

The woman spoke with one of the dockhands and he pointed at Armilla’s boat. Whatever she asked didn’t carry; the air was thick with banging, yelling, the crash of crates and barrels, the ringing of bells and the thin screeches of whistles, the yells of the cargomasters and the curses of the deckhands. The official seemed to ask the deckhand something else, but he pointed at the boat a second time, and she nodded. Was she asking for confirmation? Armilla mused. Still, the woman pointed at the scroll she carried, and the man shook his head and waved his hand over his eyes, which seemed to frustrate the woman. He gestured at the boat a third time, and then walked up one of the cargo gangplanks and into the hold of the ship. The woman turned to the row of knights and gestured at the boat, and the ranks advanced to the passenger gangplank in step, armor glowing with reflected light.

The message was clear: they needed to apprehend someone on this ship and they needed to confirm that this ship was the one they sought. Likely the dockhand couldn’t read, so he couldn’t confirm the name of the ship from the scroll.

After a scant second of thought, Armilla decided to assist. They were looking for someone, and Armilla could help. She came down the gangplank and approached the woman.

"Might I be of assistance?" she asked, and the woman glanced at her tiredly. Wisps of hair had escaped from under the brim of her peaked hat and swirled around her face, giving her a harried expression.

"Depends, can you read?" she asked pointedly, and Armilla nodded.

"I saw from the deck- it looks like you’re looking for something?" Armilla asked, and the woman nodded. "We’re looking for a Knight-errant by the name of Armilla Chancy. She should have come in on a ship from Blackwall. This ship appears to be the one we seek, but it seems the ship’s officers are..." she trailed off for a moment, "unavailable."

Armilla blinked. "I am she."

"As I thought." The woman replied dismissively, turning away, and then her gaze sharpened and swung back, the soldiers with her stiffening imperceptibly. "What?"

"I am Armilla Chancy. I’ve come to Darnell from Blackwall to seek my consecration from the Holy Church." She replied truthfully. She reached into her pack and pulled out a scrollcase. "Here are my documents."

The woman reviewed the knight’s papers of identification, and barely glanced at the letter of sponsorship itself.

"it’s her." The woman stated finally. She eyed the young knight. "Will you surrender yourself to our custody?"

"Custody?" Armilla objected with a frown. "Why?"

"You are declared a critical witness in an ongoing prosecution and you need to be secured for inquest." the woman replied formally. "Will you surrender yourself to our custody?" She repeated.

Armilla nodded confusedly. "I will."

The woman nodded. "Very good. You will need to surrender your arms and armor for examination."

Armilla allowed the knights to take her armor and sword, at which point the woman nodded her thanks.

"There is a carriage not far from here." She remarked simply, and gestured. "Do not attempt escape; you will not survive the experience." She advised perfunctorily.

"What charges?" Armilla asked, and the woman shook her head. "You weren’t paying attention, were you?" She asked severely, and shook her head, disappointed. "I said you’re a critical witness. We need your absolute cooperation. However, if you refuse to cooperate, we will be forced to respond." She replied simply, and absently tucked an errant lock of hair back under her peaked hat.

The ride to the Grand Cathedral was done in silence. The carriage she was in was pulled by two pairs of horses; the guard that was with the woman rode alongside, boxing them in. The highway was broad and paved and while it was packed with teeming throngs of people, everyone gave the mounted knights and carriage a wide berth.