The Masked Legion

Warm sunlight on my face awoke me the next morning, but my lazy bones had no desire to get out of bed just yet. Across the room, I could hear Zac carrying on a one-sided conversation. Talking to his imaginary friend again. I rolled over and hugged my pillow, enjoying its soft, feathery comforts.

The ringing of the school’s bell shattered the calm, forcing both me and Zac to sit up in bed.

“School today?” Zac groaned. “Why? Yesterday we didn’t have school…”

I shrugged. “I don’t know why, but we better get you ready and get over there. Class will start in an hour.”

“I don’t waaaant to go to school…” Zac whined.

I shrugged. “I know, buddy. Sometimes getting out of bed is hard.”

“Mr. Muk says school is a waste of time,” said Zac.

More and more, I was finding that his imaginary friend could be quite annoying. “Really? Can Mr. Muk read and write?”

Zac gave me a puzzled tilt of his head. “I don’t think so…”

“Other than you, how many friends does Mr. Muk have?”

“None.”

I folded my arms and nodded. “Sounds to me like Mr. Muk ought to try going to school. He might learn something and make some new friends.”

“Hmm…”

I stood from my bed and stretched out. “Come on… let’s get you ready for school.”

“I don’t want to go!” he protested, folding his arms and pouting.

“Zac…” I rubbed my eyes and groaned. “Please don’t fight me on this now, I’ve got to work and you’ve got to go to school. Remember what Mr. Benji always says about responsibility?”

Zac looked away from me and said nothing.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, we have two choices.” I scratched my beard, trying to think up multiple options to present him, ones that would make going to school seem better. “We can pretend you’re sick if you want, but we have to make it believable. That would mean you’d have to stay in bed with a thermometer in your mouth all day, maybe even take some of that ‘cherry-flavored’ medicine.” I made air quotes when describing the medicine’s flavor. I’d tasted it before, and the only way one could describe it as cherry-flavored was if they’d only ever eaten moldy cherries.

Zac curled up his nose at the idea.

“Or, if we can’t pretend that you’re sick, then we can take you to school, but we’ll secretly hide…” I glanced down at the floor in front of his toybox, which always had a few strays lying on the floor. A tiny wooden swordsman lay on the ground, so I picked it up. “This one. Yes, we’ll hide this guy in your book bag, so if you get bored you can pull him out and play with him. What do you think? Stay home and be sick, or go to school with this guy?”

Zac grunted, reached out, and snatched the swordsman from my hand. “I’ll go to school…” he grumbled.

Though he had agreed to go to school, Zac still wasn’t the most cooperative he’d ever been for getting ready. He took ages to pick out his clothes for the day, struggled to put his shoes on the right feet (even though he knew which shoe went to which foot), combed his hair far longer than needed, and ate his breakfast biscuit in the most tedious of nibbles.

The hour was nearly up by the time I walked him to the schoolhouse, and class was about to begin. Apparently, the other parents had about as much trouble as I had, for they all arrived at the same time I did.

I looked up toward the schoolhouse’s front door, expecting to see Keren’s glorious face as she welcomed the children in. To my surprise, a different woman stood in the doorway. After a moment of pondering, I recalled her name.

Edith?

Edith taught whenever Keren wasn’t feeling well. For a brief moment, I thought back to the short-lived indignation Zac had when I woke him up for school, and wondered if, perhaps, the reason why Keren was sick was because he’d cursed her as I suspected he’d cursed Avery.

I quickly banished the thought from my brain. Adults made Zac angry all the time, but the only time he ever struck back (if Avery’s death really was his doing) was when someone cut his face and tried to kill his father. Like all children, Zac could be petty, but he still had a good sense of right and wrong.

A resounding, distant horn drew my attention to the western end of town. Looking up to the hills, I saw countless humanoid shapes coming over the horizon. The soldiers in the streets around me looked up as well, with smiles which told me that they were expecting these visitors.

The Masked Legion…

They had arrived, just as Piers said they would. Suddenly, the streets seemed like the last place I wanted to be when they marched in. True, there was little chance that Clive had already heard what had happened to his brother, so he was unlikely to attack me the moment he arrived. Nonetheless, I wanted to remain as far from Clive and the Masked Legion as I could.

Like a child running from neighborhood bullies, I hurried back home, to the Chalice Inn.

Every table sat empty, and Benji was not behind the counter, as he usually was. Jeseka stood in the center of the room mopping the floor. Each movement of the mop caused her biceps and forearms to flex and unflex. A gentle rhythm I found strangely hypnotic.

“Ahv? Something wrong?” she asked, tilting her head to one side with a curious smirk.

“What? Oh… no, nothing’s wrong. Why?”

She giggled. “You’ve been staring at me for almost a minute now.”

“Oh… I’m sorry, I guess I’m just in a daze.”

Jeseka chuckled and leaned forward, resting her weight on the end of the mop handle with both hands. “Yeah, I have that effect on a lot of men.”

My face burned and I said, “I… I bet you do.”

She raised one eyebrow, and beamed at my compliment. “My my, Ahv… are you flirting with me?”

“You started it,” I chuckled.

Jeseka threw her head back and laughed out loud. “You’re too much fun, you know that?”

“There’s no such thing as too much fun,” I said.

She gestured to the ceiling above her with the mop handle. “The soldier up there, sleeping off his hangover, might disagree with you.”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t mean there’s such a thing as too much fun. Sometimes there’s too much of certain ways you can have fun, but there’s no such thing as too much fun.”

Jeseka pursed her lips and nodded. “That’s fair.” She lowered both hands down the mop handle and continued pushing it across the floor. I averted my eyes from her soft-yet-strong arms. “So, how’s Zac doing? You know, since the… the incident.”

“He seems to be doing fine,” I replied. “When I talked to him about it, he was more concerned about me than about himself.”

“Zac’s a selfless boy,” Jeseka said, dipping the mop in the bucket.

“Surprisingly so,” I said. “I got lucky there.”

For a moment, the only sound in the room was Jeseka’s efforts to scrub the floor clean. She broke the silence with, “Such a mess they made last night. Look at this… dried beer everywhere! How do they keep those white uniforms clean if they can’t keep beer in a glass?”

I shrugged. “It’s a mystery.”

“I guess. Hey, so, I’ve wanted to ask you something for a long time.” She looked up from the floor, her eyes meeting mine. “Benji said you used to be a delver before you came here. Is that true?”

“Yes it is,” I said, before going behind the bar to find a rag to wipe up the tables.

“So, you went into the ruins of Ancient cities and brought back their secrets, right? Their inventions, their books, artifacts, that sort of thing?”

I soaked the rag I found in a strong cleaning solution Benji kept behind the bar, the scent of which singed my nostril-hairs. “Yeah, that’s the gist of delving.”

“There pretty good money in that?”

“Only if you find something good,” I said.

“And how often did you find something… ‘good’?”

I shrugged. “Roughly every third time I went down there.”

“So, it was a good-paying job where you got paid to go adventuring and discovering the secrets of the distant past.” She leaned her head to one side curiously. “So, why quit that to work at an inn?”

“Well, for one thing, it’s hard to raise a child while working as a delver. Sometimes you spend days down there. One time I was underground for a full week before I was able to return to the surface with something good.”

Jeseka nodded. “That makes sense.”

“Besides,” I continued, scrubbing the counter, “It’s dangerous work. The Ancient cities are swarming with darklings. And then there are other delvers, who’ll kill you and steal your find if it looks expensive enough. It was worth the risk when I was only taking care of me, but now I have to worry about what will happen to Zac if I die.”

“So, the short version is…” she locked eyes with me and my heart fluttered in my chest. “You gave up a life of adventure and riches because you love your son. Right?”

I gave an affirming gesture with my hand. “That’s the long and short of it, yes. What did you do before you came here?”

“I was a bandit,” she said, flatly.

“A bandit?” I repeated with incredulity.

“Yes,” she raised both her arms and flexed. “A bandit. Isn’t it obvious? There aren’t really that many professions for orcs out there. We pretty much just have blacksmiths, hunters, mercenaries, and bandits. That’s all we’re really good at.”

I chuckled. “See, I have no trouble imagining you being… capable as a bandit, let’s say. What I have a hard time imagining is you having the heart to rob people.”

“We had our own ways of justifying what we did.” Jeseka returned to mopping the floor. “As all people do. We had certain rules: don’t rob the poor, don’t kill anyone unless you absolutely have to, never betray our own, and, if possible, only steal from tyrants, other bandits, or merchants who cheat people.”

“A gang of thieves with a code of ethics, hmm?”

She pointed her index finger at me. “Every gang of thieves has a code, otherwise the gang doesn’t last long.”

“So, what made you quit?”

Her smile faded and her face hinted at something dark and painful. “Some of us had a little disagreement about what it meant to only kill people if you ‘have to.’” She rubbed her forehead. “After that, things… well, they fell apart, and I needed a new life.”

“So you came here.”

She nodded. “The Chalice Inn is all about second chances, it has been since the beginning. It’s about assuming that people want to be good, and then trying to help them do just that.”

We heard the deafening rhythm of marching feet outside as the Masked Legion marched into town and their fellow Tagrosi soldiers came to meet them. On a brief glance out the window I caught a glimpse of one of the Masked Legion soldiers.

They wore black coats which hung down to the tops of their boots, the sleeves of which were covered in dark steel armor plates. They wore helmets with a curved top, which connected to their mostly-blank masks. Those masks had eye-holes for them to peer through and slits over their mouths and noses to allow air passage. Each Masked Legion soldier carried with him an iron baton with three lac stones: one on the pommel, one on the handle, and one on the end.

I slowly backed away from the window, trying to avoid any of these soldiers’ gaze.

“Men in masks…” Jeseka sighed. “I can tell you from personal experience, no one wears a mask when he intends to do good.” Her eyes snapped up to mine. “No one.”