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I see the heart of the city from where I stand. By simply looking down I can see the perfect rectangle of marble, its two-toned surface marred by wooden benches laid out in rings around the monument that gives the capital its name – a slim, jagged, hideous, beige monument. The rectangle is surrounded by a ring of its own, a soft blue rectangle separating it from other rectangles of smaller size. This early in the morning, there is hardly any traffic and so, to the untrained eye, it is difficult to tell that we are surrounded by water.
A particularly loud whimper brings my attention up and back through the window. I turn around and approach the large chair in the middle of the room. Several men and women in the same robes as myself mill around the figure squirming in it, forming a loose ring much like those visible below us. I draw my own robe tighter around my torso as I observe my colleagues check and recheck our equipment, only their noses and mouths visible from under the red hoods. Our clothes, and even the walls of the room, are the same colour, accented with stripes of orange running over our shoulders and down the middle of our uniforms. They are the colour of flame, the heart of our way of life.
My part in the procedure we are about to perform comes at the very end, and so I am free to walk through the ring and to the scarlet seat. The figure atop it looks at me. She is a child on the eve of her eleventh birthday, dressed in a plain white robe. The only sign of her importance is the small metal crest attached to a chain around her neck. It is the only jewellery she wears, but both components are so slim I feel they would shatter if I so much as touch either. She looks me in the eye as she takes deep breaths. She has been hyperventilating on and off since she was brought here, but her overnight lessons have begun to sink in. Her fear is obvious, but she is determined to see this through. I suppose it’s commendable in its own way: the last two children had long been restrained by this point.
There are two sharp knocks on the double doors. The nearest attendant brushes her sweaty palms on her robes before heaving them open, but only the girl and I have the luxury to look up as the four newcomers enter. The first two to enter do so under the edges of the wide doorway. They are our colleagues, draped in our attire. Their heads remain low as they turn inward as one and the second pair enters: a man and a woman.
The man is dressed in a smart suit with a thick cape draped over his shoulders, all the same colours of fire. His ears, neck and fingers are adorned with thick jewels that shimmer in even the dim light under which we work as he hobbles into the room, hunched over the ornate cane he grips in both hands. His wife is but a step behind him, a hand on his back. She wears thin white garments, a feeble, steel bracelet around her wrist to match the ornate gold around her husband’s, and a familiar necklace denoting the clan she has married into. Both approach their daughter, but while the father leans over her, soothing her even as he coughs into his unkempt grey beard, the mother keeps her distance, chewing her lip. Each parent is a perfect encapsulation of one of the two futures the girl once faced, and it is not my place to question the decision that was made.
The bell outside tolls and the father pushes himself upright with a grunt. He hobbles over to me. He looks me in the eye with the same fear his daughter had shown mere minutes ago. It is only in small motions like this that his youth is able to show itself.
“Master…?”
“She will be safe in our care, Lord.”
“So…” he started coughing. His wife rubbed his back, though I wonder how much of her touch he could sense beneath the cloak. “In one hour from now...”
“She will be ready to move, yes.” A nurse beckons me over the man’s shoulder, a glass cup in his hand. I acknowledge him with a brief nod. “She can drink water if she needs it, but she will only be able to eat two hours after that.”
“At midday, yes. Yes.” He nods to himself. “The procedure was different for me, you see. Longer.”
“I assure you, the new method has not sacrificed security for its speed. The Lady will be ready for her debut.”
“Good, good.” With a final nod, he let his wife escort him to the corner of the room. Once they were seated, I walked to the nurse and accepted the cup. I held it up to the light. The volcanic glass is sacred to this nation, but the dark blue clashes with the dominant colours around me. The only patterns on it are the measurements carved into its sides and coated with ordinary glass dyed white. However, I consider the dark colour to be a blessing in disguise.
Beside the girl is a plain stool with a small barrel perched atop it, crafted from rigid oak. It has a smooth, unblemished surface safe for the silvered tap protruding in front of me. I place the cup close enough to obscure the contents as I turn the metal cap. The wood trembles for a moment before a trail of black, viscous liquid creeps out. The liquid forms a large drop beneath the tap, swelling, swelling, swelling… and then it falls into the cup. Drip, drip, drip.
This takes time. The cup is not even halfway full before the child begins to fidget once more. If there was no risk of decay, I could have prepared the cup ahead of time, but alas. I crouch as more of the liquid falls into the cup, keeping an eye on the level. It should come as no surprise that every single drop of this commodity must be accounted for. Any excess must be returned to the barrel at once. Any spills must be cleaned and paid for, also at once… but at least the only ones who pay for our services are those who are capable of the latter.
The correct dosage has been reached. I turn the tap off ahead of time and wait for the final splashes on the surface of the fluid before I stand. On cue, my colleagues hold the girl’s arms and legs still. A fifth tilts her head up. She opens her mouth of her own accord and the attendant keeps it open as behind me her parents whimper. I pull her lower lip down, then bring the glass to her mouth. I tilt it, and the sludge begins to tip inside.
Her eyes grow wide at once and her tongue attempts to flex, but there is nothing she can do to stop it crawling down her throat. She swallows and her small features contort. I see her neck ripple as she tries to reject the liquid, but her reflexes have already been numbed by the injections she received overnight. All she can do now is swallow. And so she does. Then I pour the second mouthful in. She swallows it too, but now the spasms begin. I step back, holding the cup high as the attendants tighten their holds on her. I hear scuffling in the back of the room and turn to see that her father has fallen over. His wife is caught between the two members of her family for a moment, but chooses her daughter. She moves as quickly as she can without running to the chair as the girl does her best to reject the treatment.
“Please be strong love, please be strong.” She clasps her hands in prayer as the child’s eyes roll back into her head and froth begins to form in the corners of her mouth. Her skin grows pale and I know from experience as a restrainer that her skin is alternating between hot and cold faster than she can comprehend, adding external pain to the turmoil of her internal transformation. The sensations do not stop, but I return to my station once she is too weak to react to them and pull her lip down once more.
“This is the last one.” It is the only time I’ve spoken to her since making the introductions lev hours ago. She takes a deep breath in and lets out a whimper before relaxing her jaw. I pour the last of the sludge-like material into her mouth and watch as she fights it down. I place my palm over her mouth to keep any from spraying it as she heaves, but before long it passes down her gullet. She continues thrashing for a few minutes more, then her body slows down. I escort her mother back to her husband, who has returned to his seat as the women left behind tear off the girl’s sleeves and raise the hem of her skirt to her knees, then strap her to the chair.
“Lady,” I say to the mother as the attendants take a step away from the chair. “It is not safe for you anymore. Please take your husband and leave this place. Wait downstairs.”
“What are you doing to my daughter?”
Her husband takes her hand, wincing as the girl whines behind me. “Patience, love. The same happened for me. The worst of it is over now.”
“Truly?”
“Truly.”
She looks at me and I nod. I try to stand between her and her child without letting her notice. She watches the girl over my shoulder for a moment before nodding, chewing her lip once again.
“Very – very well.”
The pair leave the room, the man coughing anew. I close the doors behind them and, when I hear their footsteps fade, lock them. This close, I can see the faint sheen left behind by the treatment to make the wood resistant to what could come as our patient’s body reforges itself. The same sheen would have been visible on the chair and the leather straps if the now-absent Lord and Lady had thought to look. Our robes have the same precautions into them, as are the masks we now all don as we reform a circle around the girl and keep vigil. She thrashes, she groans, she weeps. She screams as her extremities burn and I am secretly glad that her mother is no longer in the room. Throughout it all, we watch in silence.
Until, a few minutes after the clock strikes dek, she too becomes silent.
I stand before a vast hole in the earth. The dark brown rock and dirt turns to the black of the sea of oil, but my gaze is drawn back up by the numerous steel pipes plunged into its surface. Up here, within this mountain, men and women turn wheels to pull the dark matter into large vats. There are a few motors strewn among the mess of manual labour, operated by disgraced nobles, that expedite the process somewhat, though mathematicians somewhere far away have told us that the work will not be completed for several centuries yet: it will be difficult to tell back home if people here choose to slack every now and then.
I step back from the abyss and watch as the filled vats are lifted with winches onto carts pulled by horses, blinders drawn over their eyes to keep the signs of industry from shattering their simple minds. Each cart takes six large barrels before its horse is ushered forward and the next moves beneath the man-powered crane. This current shipment will consist of three carts: 18 vats of sacred oil in exchange for the 18 barrels of water they brought from the city.
Or rather 15 vats of sacred oil, and almost 3 vats’ worth of unusable sludge: the Spirit of the Underground is not so generous as to give us a perfect bounty – sentient beings rarely are. These three barrels are marked with large ‘X’s drawn on their sides and lids. These will be disposed of in a safe location near here, far from innocent eyes and thieving hands.
When the third cart is loaded, I climb onto it. Several wreathes of flowers are layered around each barrel as we begin the slow trek into the sun, so the smell is not as bad as you would think, though I am thankful once again for the mask sewn into my robes. There are three people assigned to each cart: one to drive the horse, one to secure the cargo, and a third to ensure the material is pure at both ends of the journey – this is my role, and the second responsibility given to me by the crown, the only bloodline guaranteed to never need my services.
We emerge from the tunnel in a matter of minutes, and as I close my eyes I feel the familiar shudder of horses being blinded by the sun. I hear a faint rustle as our driver changes her eyepatch from one eye to the other to retain her vision while I pull a blindfold from one of my large pockets and wrap it around both of my own. The man sitting across from me does the same. I look at the barren land around us as the horses begin to trot again. I watch as the mountain slowly but surely fades into the distance, taking the small farm cultivated beside it into the horizon with it. For the least privileged people working in the refinery, that is the only source of food they will ever know. The non-nobles, on the other hand, will leave when the moon reaches its peak in the night sky.
I lean my head back as I close my eyes once more. For some reason, the stench of the oil wafts upward while the flowers’ aroma wafts horizontally, so this way I increase the proportion of the latter that makes it to my nose. We will ride for an hour in this way, though only the first and last dek minutes will be spent above ground. I look around me again. In the far distance I see a nest, a spiral of stone and wood that seems to have spun out of the earth itself, shielding any occupants within from our unworthy human eyes. A single mass of unliving material like this is enough to stake a claim to triquas of acres of land that not even the most foolish of kings dares challenge: when their mere presence is enough to rend a man into unrecognisable gibbets of flesh and bone, it is important to remember, to teach our children as soon as they are able to understand as one of the central tenants they must live their lives by: don’t succumb to greed against your fellow man. Don’t fall prey to prejudice. Never forget that this is their world: we are but the specks of dust that gather in the upper corners of a room that the owner doesn’t see the need to remove just yet. For now, they simply humour our scant cities and farmlands.
The slopes of the tunnels we travel through to keep ourselves safe are so slight that it takes a long time for me to realise we are descending into the earth. I suspect I will always be surprised, despite all the years I have made this trip. They were dug this way so that all manner of people regardless of disability would be able to use them, but after the mine was built our predecessors learned that horses also found a gentle slope easier to traverse when hauling heavy loads, just as three of them were now. As we sank further into the bowels of the planet, the three horses pulled to the left of the wide path, though people rarely travelled this late in the day. I watched the night sky as we went deeper and deeper and deeper. Just before we entered the mouth of the tunnel, the moon and stars disappeared, plunging us into perfect darkness.
The horses whinnied again, but their drivers eased them forward until the sight of lanterns lit along the walls calmed them into a gentle trot. If we had gotten to the mouth even a few seconds later, who knows what the horses would have done? I could imagine them running amok in their confusion, trying to find the light again, and what would they have done, if their keen eyes had seen three elongated toothpicks scurrying about their domain?
Well, that doesn’t matter now.
I leaned back in the cart again, but this time I removed the blindfold and kept my eyes open. I count the lanterns as we pass them by. Two. Four. Six. Eight. It occurs to me, and not for the first time, that it’s dangerous to have lit flames in enclosed spaces like this, but what other choices do we have if we want to travel safely? I pity the men and women who make a living out of walking through these tunnels every day and night, lighting or extinguishing these lights, but while their great number could deprive us of air if we stayed here for too long, the illumination also kept these passageways free of ambush points and thieves.
Well, most thieves.
I glance ahead. We had reached the slight curve in the tunnel I had been counting up to. The first horse had already crossed it and the second was just about to, giving us precious seconds to act before we followed suit. I made eye contact with the man sitting across me and nodded. Three things happened in the next instant.
One: the second cart slid out of view as our driver slowed down just enough to give us a window without alarming our peers.
Two: we passed between another pair of thin braziers. Our bodies and our cargo cast long shadows on either side of the cart.
Three: I reached out, touching two of the marked barrels with my ungloved hands and the third with my chin, and pushed them into the union of their shadows and mine.
That done, I watched my partner sink into his own shadow and push up three identical barrels that I hoisted into position. He surfaced as we turned the corner and returned to his casual slouch just the cart before us came into view. His counterpart turned back and so he gave them a wave as I sank my hand into my shadow, keeping my posture as unchanging as I could, feeling our stolen barrels just beneath the surface of the wood, both heavy and light in the hidden sea.
Half an hour later, we turned right at the only junction in the tunnel while our colleagues continued onward, though stopped moments later as a man in a suit waved us down. He looked at our driver, then at me. Recognition flashed before his eyes and he pulled open the wooden gate before us, allowing us entry. We moved forward under his watchful eyes until the tunnel opened up, revealing a second factory under the earth, with gashes carved out of the roof above our heads to let in air and natural light. I glanced up as we rolled beneath one such opening: the sky had returned.
We stopped beneath a familiar looking mechanism and waited as the workers lowered a hook to us. One by one we helped them unload each of the waste barrels onto three smaller, human-sized carts. A foreman cracked open each lid to inspect the contents and nodded three times: one for each. He scratched three ticks onto the paper in his hand, then gave our driver a thumbs-up. She nodded and set the horse moving once more. I kept an eye on the barrels as our steed walked a wide circle around the loading bay and returned the way we came. Even I’d lost count of how many counterfeits we’d delivered just like this. The barrels were too easy to replicate; the three we were leaving behind were filled with almost nothing but black soil and water, with a layer of the waste oil they believed they were rolling away to produce the familiar smell. But I have no any pity for them, as what we deliver here will never be used, simply emptied into an even deeper pit than the one we had left in an attempt to keep the nation we had all been born into intact. As we climbed up the steep slope – easier for the horse now that its load had almost halved – I allowed myself the briefest of smiles.
At the end of our allotted hour, we were rattling through the barren land before the capital’s high walls, built on the last of the country’s solid ground. We passed through the high gates, as tall as unqua adults standing atop on another, and saw row upon row of crops. First came vegetables, but as we passed from earth to marshlands the plants also transformed to various leaves and herbs before giving way to a row of marked fishing zones along the shore. We continued onto one of the three bridges leading into Clawshard City itself. We drove to the largest of the royal warehouses and were waved in by a second guard, though this time we were placed under the gaze of several dozen armed soldiers as our horse ambled forward. We came to a second stop soon after and the three remaining barrels were unloaded onto another three mini-carts. This time however, I joined the foreman in inspecting them. He ticked them off the same way their brethren had been, but I knew these barrels, the ones that would actually see use, would be checked and rechecked many times more before they were laid to rest, by people both equal to and superior to me in experience with the product. The three of us received our pay (inversely proportional to the effort each of us had exerted to make the delivery, just as one would expect) and our charioteer was dismissed. The handler, my fellow passenger on our hour-long journey, was pulled away soon after to discuss business with his colleagues. Finally, I took my leave after receiving a salute from the remaining men around me.
That was the end of my legal duties for the day. The handler would likely be occupied for a long time to come, kept in place by societal norms if not professional ones. The driver would be expected to deliver both horse and cart to the stables she had rented them from before returning to her cheap abode, just as her fellow drivers would have done before her.
But there was no rule against her taking her temporary partners for strolls in the cool night air, neither did I have any obligation to retire to my own quarters just yet.
And so it was that 18 minutes later, the world found a woman in a brown cloak riding a horse back out of the city and orbiting it clockwise around its great wall before disappearing into a second tunnel, an empty cart behind them.
I didn’t feel the cart coming to a halt, but I heard her voice muffled through the black sea. I swim to the surface, pushing through the paradoxical liquid. It crushes my chest but flows like the purest of air into my lungs. I reach up with a hand and grip the floor of the cart from within, using it as leverage to push each of the three barrels that have accompanied me in my near-blind travels. I feel her pulling them away from me with gusto, a gusto I know far too well.
I breach the water-like substance when the work is done. The back of the cart has already been lowered and the driver is helping others, men and women covered in soot, roll the stolen goods down. I walk down the slope just as she hands the final barrel off. She turns at the sound of my footsteps, beaming ear to ear.
“Is it time, Lord?”
“Don’t call me Lord.”
“Ah, forgive me. It’s just that we were out there for so long and I… is it time, sir?”
“Don’t call me sir either.”
“…is it time?”
“Yes.”
A small part of me wants to apologise for my words, but before I can form the words she spies a friend and is off in a flash. In a heartbeat she is upon him, asking him where the treatment will be performed, if he will bear witness, if she will have more appealing work to do once it is done. I daresay she moved faster than if she’d been on horseback.
I sigh and push the back of the cart up and lock it in place once more, a duty that was meant to be hers, but this night will be longer than she knows: she is allowed her joy while it lasts. The pair walk and talk their way into one of the many mud huts built into this hideaway and I follow from afar, donning my gloves as I go, hearing a pair of farmhands lead the horse away behind me.
The woman sits on a straw mat laid on the rocky earth, a bundle of straw and hay pressed between her and the wall so she can remain upright. She has already pulled up the sleeve of her left arm, her dominant one. Good: she already knows what to expect. Beside her is a low trough of black sludge. I know for a fact that it is from an earlier shipment, but it could still be one I helped deliver, for all I know. Her friend hands me a syringe, then grips her shoulder. They watch as I draw the metal tip from its glass casing and insert it into the dark liquid. I pull back the plunger. It is as difficult as you might expect, but my measurements must be as precise here as when I work for the nobility – the only difference in that regard is that the latter calculations had centuries of prior work done to be perfected.
I draw out the necessary amount of oil after a few minutes of effort. I move to lean over the woman, but she crosses her arm over her legs and offers it to me, ignoring the soft intake of her friend’s breath. I wonder if he would be this nervous in simpler matters as well; if she had skinned her knee perhaps, or was about to give birth. The thought is short-lived however, as I squeeze the inside of her forearm, searching for a vein. A few surface and I massage the surrounding skin to bring them further into the dim light above us. I select one and dip the tip of the needle into it.
The woman hisses more quietly than her partner.
I press the needle deep enough so that the blood vessel covers the entirety of its opening. Then I begin to push. Even though the vein by its very nature is helping the oil reach her heart, removing it from the syringe is more arduous a task than adding it. Even in the poor lighting the three of us can see a faint blackness ease its way into her body, like spilled ink spreading over water. The woman’s pursed lips clash with her trembling cheeks as I continue to work. More of the oil enters her body. More still. It is when I am a third of the way through the barrel that she clutches her heart and lets out a drawn-out, ragged gasp. The man grasps both of her shoulders, but she is keeping her dominant arm as still as she can even now. She is younger than I was when I was in her position, and yet she handles herself with more poise than I ever could. But I still pause, my eyes moving from her contorted, scarlet face to the death grip clenching her shirt.
This phenomena, one we have yet to find a solution for, is the reason we don’t inject this concoction directly into the heart.
We wait for a full minute before she sags and her hand drops to her lap as if it had been severed from her sturdy frame. The man raises a glass of water – something I had missed as it had been behind him until now – and brings it to her lips, only to pause as she continues to ventilate. Only when she nods does he bring it to her lips. I imagine the cool water will revive enough of her conscious mind for me to continue and sure enough, as soon as the final mouthful has moved down her throat she gives me a nod.
However, it is fine if her mental barriers slip, for my knee has been anchored in her shadow from the moment I accepted the syringe.
She does not suffer any subsequent issues after I resume, not after the second third of the oil has entered her system, not after the fifth sixth of it. I marvel again at how much more composed she is compared to my past self. The black fog has moved beyond her veins at this point: now it creeps out from the hole in her arm and from her heart, splitting again and again like thin vines, the pigment of her skin fading as if to fuel the black lines. Her breath grows more ragged as I proceed, her throat relenting only to gasp as I squeeze her arm one last time to remove the now-empty instrument. I place the limb by her side and grip her right wrist, the one closest to me. I continue to scan her up and down, my attention predominantly focused on where her body touches her small shadow. By the time the last of the oil has passed through her heart, the black lines coat her entire form and she shudders.
“Start a fire.”
It was difficult not to croak the words, but they still came out as a whisper after staying silent for so long. The man hears me all the same and, though his hands linger on the woman’s shoulders as he stands, he runs to spread a bundle of twigs and branches he has already prepared in a pile beside me, close enough to give comfort yet far enough to not risk igniting her bed. I commend his restraint in his time of peril.
The fire whimpers to life, but he continues to poke and prod until it roars. The effect is near-immediate and the driver closes her eyes with a contented sigh. I tighten my grip on her by reflex when I hear the sound and dig my knee deeper into the underworld. I feel the edge of the void digging into my leg as I do so.
But the extra exertion is for naught: unqua minutes pass in silence and the vines begin to recede, her natural skin tone creeping back in from her extremities like slow ripples in a lake flowing backward through time. I wait until the lines have descended beyond the collar of her shirt before letting her go and rolling down her sleeve – there is no need for bandages after a successful procedure. I wait for her eyes to focus on the outside world before taking her hand in mine and shaking it gently. I know when she becomes cognisant of the action: it’s when she introduces vigour to the gesture.
“You performed far better than I did.” I ignore the twinge of humiliation in the back of my mind.
“You don’t need to flatter me, Lor – ah.” She pauses with her mouth open, then chuckles. She stops quickly. After all, she is still out of breath.
“I speak the truth.” I pull off my gloves. It is only as I stand that I let her shadow go. “Rest tonight and tomorrow. Your horse will already be on its way home now, so your absence will not be noticed in the city.”
“I…” she purses her lips again, but her eyes are more vibrant this time. “Alright then. But… when I’ve recovered, I can join you right away, can’t I Lord?”
I don’t bother correcting her, for I’m too busy fighting the urge to pinch the bridge of my nose. No matter how they react to the procedure, all of these asinine fools ask the same question as soon as they’re able to speak. It is yet another way in which my successors differ from me.
But, faced with that repeating expression, I find myself unable to break tradition as well.
“Of course.”
And the dark thoughts blossom evermore.