RE: Monarch

Everything I had seen, everything that could happen—would happen if I did nothing—weighed heavy on my shoulders. It was always there, lurking above me, threatening to crush me if I stopped and really considered it.

Emotions could only hurt me here. So, I pushed them down. I withdrew within myself, still keeping up the pleasant face for Nethtari and Kilvius. When we entered the house, it was all I could do not to stare at the floor on where they died.

“Hungry, Cairn?” Kilvius asked.

“More tired than hungry.”

“Have it your way.” Kilvius shrugged. As I walked around the spot where Jorra had fallen, I felt Nethtari’s eyes on me as I climbed the stairs.

I’d talk to them, eventually. But not yet. The way I started this would be crucial. At the moment, I was the only one who knew what would happen to the city at the end of the month, other than the people involved. The moment I spoke of it to anyone—even Nethtari and Kilvius—the bottle would be uncorked.

And I’d long since learned the lesson of how hard it was to keep critical information from spreading, let alone information as vital as this.

I sequestered myself in Maya’s room, locking the door behind me. Experimentally, I held out my hand and reached for the wind. Nothing happened. At first, I was frightened that whatever had triggered the awakening had been undone by the reset, but thinking about logically, that made no sense. If it was the case that I received the demon-flame from Maya in the first place, and that carried over somehow, it only made sense that my second element would function similarly.

Slowly, I walked through the process of what I’d done in the Everwood. Isolating the feeling. I no longer needed to feel despair to summon the demon-flame, but it helped. The solution for air was much easier to isolate, though harder to reproduce: Rage. I didn’t have to reach for it. It was there, boiling under the surface.

The slightest breeze extended from my fingertips, barely stirring the curtains. Pretty anemic, compared to what I’d done with it in the short time before I died, but at least that proved it was still there.

I unrolled the length of butcher paper I’d acquired from the market and knelt over it. The piece of charcoal in my hand snapped in two almost immediately. I swore, fighting a sudden urge to hit something.

Not productive, Cairn.

I took in deep breaths. The ticking of the clock in Maya’s room needled at me. I had more time than ever before, but the problem was exponentially larger.

Slowly, I began to draw out a diagram.

There were three major problems. Firstly, of course, was the attack on the enclave. The demons involved looked similar to how the Asmodial legion had been described to me: Uniformly dark in color with an aura of smoke. Major variations on their shape and size, but the same was true of all legions. They were clearly strong and had torn through the poorer districts like they were nothing, but I had no idea how their strength measured up to the Enclave military.

I underlined “Asmodial Legion,” and moved on, writing the word “Ambush,” in all caps.

That was the second problem. There were a lot of issues and complications brought on by the ambush in the Twilight Chambers. Granted, the fight was chaotic and I’d spent a large chunk of it underwater, but I was relatively certain there were no demons among the attacking force. I wrote “No Sigil,” in a subheading beneath ambush.

No one used men like that unless they were doing something off-books. So it was unlikely the council was aligned against me—even if they had been, there were easier ways to kill me. The timing was more than suspect. There was no way the attack on the enclave and the ambush in the tunnel were unrelated. It was simply too improbable.

Which meant the demons weren’t acting on their own. But what would it take to incite an entire demonic legion to attack the very people capable of causing them serious long-term issues? I tabled that question for now.

Next, I drew an arrow to Guemon’s name. It had to be him. He was shortsighted enough to call for my execution at the trial, and yeah, maybe before I might have assumed that was posturing, but not after everything else. The motive for attacking the enclave itself was beyond me. I just didn’t have enough information.

Guemon’s involvement as the sole adversary begged a question: how had he known about the expedition into the Twilight Chamber? It wasn’t the sort of thing that Ralakos would just bring up in casual conversation, especially considering how politically opposed the two were. He was the security advisor, there were likely hundreds of men who reported to him on a daily basis. But I doubted he would have had time to organize an ambush that devastating on the day of.

Meaning he knew it was going to happen ahead of time.

I drew a line from Ralakos’s to Guemon and wrote, “Leak?”

It wasn’t unfeasible. You could have the best men in the world, but all it would take is one. A single guard, moderately placed, with gambling debts. Ralakos employed a few hundred, at the very least. I almost wrote down Erdos’s name, but reconsidered. He was ornery and unsociable, but he’d gone out of his way to save me. It was possible he’d vented to the wrong person, but he seemed too strait-laced to be the source.

The third problem was by far the most difficult, creating issues both short and long term. I wrote “demon-fire” and underlined it twice. Someone in the enclave was able to use it, possibly multiple someones. That changed things. Not only did it drastically reduce my value here, but it spoke of an ongoing conspiracy that existed for far longer than my presence here. Someone had access to it, and instead of using it to open the dimension gate, had instead been hiding it for years.

Why?

Perhaps they simply couldn’t use it at the level required, but somehow, I doubted it. It seemed far more likely they’d been holding it for a specific reason. That there was some sort of plan in place to come forward with it at the ability at the perfect moment. But I was stumped as to what that moment could be. Whatever it was, my being here had driven a wedge in that plan, forcing their hand. But if that was true, why use it to attack the enclave? The demons were enough of a destructive force on their own.

Grimacing, I drew my own name, fighting the surge of emotion that came with it. I had a double. A doppelgänger created through magical means. And I doubted my double attacked Nethtari and Kilvius without reason.

I felt the charcoal crack in my hand, and caught myself, burying the emotion.

Had I died in the ambush, all that would be left was my double, tearing through the enclave. What better way to renew hostilities between Whitefall and the Enclave than to create the illusion that King Gil sent his son in like a poxed blanket, offering peace with one hand only to raze and murder with the other. I stared at the diagram, now a massive collection of scribbled words and lines and arrows, then drew a line between my name and demon-fire.

It would certainly help lend credence to the rumor that it was me sowing chaos in the city. But again, the question was why?

I hesitated, then drew one final name in the center of the page and put a question mark next to it.

Thoth.

My first instinct was that she wasn’t here. The enclave was largely ethnocentric. Even if she was well connected, it would be difficult for her to move around without being spotted. But she had a particular talent for catching me off-guard. Whatever was happening in the enclave, I had a hard time imagining a scenario where she was pulling strings behind the scenes, especially if she was telling the truth about Tusk being her social manipulator. Not to mention, she wasn’t exactly subtle. Had she wanted me dead, I very much doubted the ambush would have failed.

After hesitating for a moment, I scratched out her name. I’d keep an eye out and an ear to the ground, but for now there were enough ghosts lurking in the shadows without adding one more to the mix.

----

I went up to the surface with Jorra to gather vurseng. My supply had dwindled, and I needed to make every moment count. I’d need to hammer out a schedule, something feasible, but I’d do that later. I kept an eye out, hoping to catch a glimpse of the shadow-panther, but wasn’t particularly surprised when that didn’t happen.

A stem of vurseng split, exposing the soft pulp to the air and ruining the crop. I scowled.

“Who died?” Jorra asked.

I looked up at him, blinking.

He added another blue-gold plant to the clothe-enclosed bundle in his arms. “You were making a scary face.”

“Just wasted a plant.” I held the ruined stalk out to him.

“Sure, but you’ve looked like that pretty much the whole time we’ve been topside.”

Ah. The war face.

“It’s nothing,” I said. It suddenly occurred to me how much I missed Maya. Nothing was going to make this easy, but if she was here it would have at least been easier. I could ask her questions that would be too conspicuous to ask anyone else, bounce ideas back and forth. We worked well together.

“Jorra,” I said, chewing on my lip. “How hard would it be to get Maya out of the Sanctum?”

Jorra smirked. “Missing my sister that much already?”

“Hush. Just speaking hypothetically. Is it doable?”

“Not really. You’re really not supposed to leave in the first three months, unless you don’t plan on coming back.”

“What would it look like if you tried?”

“Mom and dad would have to send someone in to get her, and even then, there’s no guarantee how long it would take that person to find her. The sanctum’s a big place.”

A dead-end, then. I tossed the ruined stem aside. “I figured.”

“Guess you’ll just have to rely on me.” He grinned. I gave him a playful shove.

“Only in the worst case scenario,” I said.

----

Later that evening, after I smoked enough vurseng to keep me up for the rest of the night, I returned to Maya’s room. I found what I was looking for in her closet: the simple black and white mask she had worn in Kholis.

The brutal truth was, I didn’t know the enclave well enough. I’d spent so much time practicing magic and learning demonic that I’d neglected the city itself, only gleaning the most basic information on how it functioned. And if it was like Whitefall, I wasn’t going to learn much of anything walking around in the middle of the day. You learned the most about what made a city what it was by exploring when most “civilized” folk had long since gone to sleep. The transformation a city underwent after midnight tended to be a much more honest reflection what it actually was, as opposed to what it pretended to be.

I wrapped my arms in bandages and slid on my cloak. My field of view narrowed as I put the mask on my face. There was so much to do I could barely keep track of it all.

But for now, it was time to get to know the other side of the enclave.

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