Escape From Castle Indris

A numb cloud over his mind is the only thing keeping him from frenzy. Raum sees the feather upon its table, but does not know the code language to tell anything to Aquila. Still, he automatically reaches to take it — and flinches away.

He cannot have it link him to the comms room, he realises, as he exits the room and closes the concealed door behind him to hide the majordomo’s corpse. He traces haphazard copies of the majordomo’s maps, cursing himself.

Think. An Ordishman squirrels into a castle, only for its majordomo to die the day after? In the middle of a cultist attack? The Dame clearly has some authority, and already thinks poorly of him. His clothes are splattered with blood, too. Unable to conceive any immediate way to justify or explain himself, Raum decides: time for him and Reyl to leave.

He restrains the urge to draw attention by running, though he does walk briskly through the halls to her room. He and Reyl need to get out of here — not just because they could get caught and charged for the majordomo’s death, but because the place is already infiltrated with fucking assassins.

A tempest whirls in his mind. How the hell could an assassin have gotten into the castle within a day of Raum’s arrival, unless they’d already been planted there? And if they’d already been planted there — how would they know Raum and Reyl would be there, unless…

…unless the cult was just so coordinated, so informed, so numerous, so mobile, so secretive… not hide nor hair up to Burmal, then the second they reach Indris…

…was the food poisoned too? Though a surge of panic screams at him to sprint, he tempers himself down with a: no. If it had been poisoned, the recording would be pointless. There was clearly significance — outside of the fact that it would kill them both at once — that their assassin chose this distinct and odd weapon. He would contemplate it further, but the noise of shouts and fighting from Reyl’s room instantly shatters all other concerns.

Raum bursts into the room. Reyl is brawling with an unfamiliar man wearing a simple cloak over a servant’s uniform. Though she isn’t quite winning, she is holding him off well enough that his knife has yet to gut her. Raum barrels in, tackles him, and pins him to the ground. Reyl confiscates the knife, blood from her reopened stitches soaking her in red.

They don’t have much time, but they must plan ahead properly. As Raum keeps the assassin pinned and explains the majordomo situation, Reyl kicks in the guy’s head and snaps the fingers of his dominant hand. The tortured writhing underneath him makes Raum’s grip slacken under a battering of nausea, but he refocuses and forces himself to consider his memory of the maps, for an escape route.

After bandaging herself quickly with strips of bedsheet, Reyl continues her interrogation. Who are you? Who sent you? How large is your chapter? Where are you based? Where is your leader? Raum himself is as close to screaming as the assassin is under her torture, but when Raum breaks away and the assassin moves to strike Reyl, Raum does catch the guy’s arm in time. Reyl’s knife flashes to the assassin’s neck. He’s been blubbering too much to answer. Reyl tells Raum she’s just going to kill him.

Joliet! The assassin screams. My leader’s a city over, in Joliet…

Raum tells Reyl not to kill him just yet. Who’s leaking information to the cult?

Joliet, the assassin groans.

And the guy Indris’ guard force is facing — how important is he?

Fucking, the assassin spits, goon.

That’s probably all they’ll get. Knowledge from the maps tells Raum that Joliet is both the next stop, and the last stop, on the southbound train line. If they can exit the castle and stowaway on a train… with the castle locked down, though, they can’t just walk out the front door.

Aquila’s feather flashes through his mind, and a tentative idea strikes him. Now that they have apprehended the actual murderer, they should be able to plead their innocence to the Dame. But his mouth fills with a bad aftertaste before he can even speak this idea. He looks to Reyl.

She throws on the assassin’s cloak to conceal her distinctive appearance. Time for them to move, now.

With a nod of agreement, Raum retrieves a rope from from a nearby storeroom. The courtyard below buzzes with personnel the Dame has rounded up, as Raum ties the rope around a merlon on the parapet. He asks Reyl if she’s fit enough to abseil. She gives the craziest, most reassuring grin Raum has seen in his life, and says yes. The rumble of a departing freight train then shakes the castle on cue, as it passes down the hill nearby.

Reyl descends the rope without too much difficulty. But their assailant, using only one hand, is anxious and slow. He only makes it halfway down the rope when out from the castle and onto the parapets bursts the Dame, her hair framing her scowl like a stormcloud.

She will easily catch them if he flees, especially with Reyl injured and their assailant emboldened to resist. Raum bundles his radio and the recorder in his overcoat and throws it down to Reyl while the Dame charges over, sword drawn. Its point lands on Raum’s neck as silhouettes of guardsmen appear in the hall to the parapets, some seconds behind her. Raum forces a smile and tells her to slow down because she is manhandling a Whitewood, but the Dame tempers her shock and refocuses promptly to pursuing Reyl, assuming Raum already subdued for all purposes.

Seizing this moment of distraction, Raum wrestles her for her sword — in the scuffle, they slice through the rope.

The Dame gathers herself and overpowers Raum quickly. Reinforcements stream to surround them. When Raum glimpses, afar on the bridge, Reyl forcing their assailant onto the roof of the train, then following herself, he finally raises his hands in surrender.

Raum is apprehended and shuttled on a convoy to the neighbouring city of Joliet. With the majordomo dead, and him already being a ruler-in-absentia for the assassinated Whitewoods, nobody in Indris has the legal authority to order the interrogation, sentencing, or execution of political criminals. So the Dame is entrusting Raum, instead, to the governor of Joliet and his legitimate judicial processes.

It’s not a long trip, but it’s not an inconsequential one, either. A couple more days on the road.

A few important things happen in the meantime.

One: The Dame and the guard of Indris resume combating the cultist who had been sheltering with Desiree. Even with all the city’s military resources funnelled into defeating this one man, Indris is losing, mightily. The cultist pushes a swath of destruction all the way to the castle. He demands they give him Raum, or he detonates the city. But Raum has already left, several days ago, in fact. The Dame, intimidated, concedes to the cultist’s demands that he be given a train ride to Joliet.

And two: Reyl, through immense fatigue, pain, and nausea, collects herself. Sufficient harassment and browbeating has settled her captive assailant’s demeanour into meek obedience, honestly, a little too easily. Sure, chalk it to cowardice, but the gap between a single-minded high-profile state-bullying cultist terrorist assassin and the snivelling wreck before her is immense. As she contemplates, and meditates on her next move, her cloak begins moving as if tugged by a ghost. Something inside its hem feels to be bucking about. Reyl cuts open the cloak, and out from the hem there falls a single, pristine white feather, tapping at the air in a frenzy.

Raum, in the convoy, has little to do except worry.

Reyl’s well-being. His well-being. The assassin. The cultist. Are they again at risk of running afoul of Phoenix’s commands. Does it even matter, if Raum can’t extricate himself from whatever comes next. It’s not like he got into this situation with any plan of how to escape it.

Ever since arriving in Indris — no, ever since arriving in Asphodel — he’s been subject to the machinations of parties whose plots feel to be fifty steps ahead of him. The information he needs to predict them, understand them, and outmanoeuvre them feels as opaque as brick. He cannot say what the ultimate goal of the cult is, who its principal figures are, how its members communicate, and how large of an organisation it is. Nobody seems to know these things. Everything is rumours, supposition, and hearsay.

That said.

That said, though.

Putting together everything he’s heard and seen so far, certain strands of information feel to finally cohere into a single, definite thread. And though this thread tugs at his mind incessantly — a mental haze fogs it over, and Raum’s eyes automatically avert elsewhere.

Someone will save me.

Reyl will save me. Desiree will save me. Phoenix will save me. Someone — the Dame, the dead majordomo, Trivia Venn, even the fucking assassin makes the list, anyone. When the hour strikes that he truly needs them, somebody will come.

It’s a familiar weakness. Put him in a corner, and the dependency comes out.

He leans back in his seat and sets his hand on his shoulder, imagining Aquila’s soft, slender fingers under his own. Even as his hand trembles, the tenderness of their ghostly touch warms his heart, unmistakably.