Chapter 40 | Garroway
Garroway
Things have begun spiraling at a breakneck pace since our attack at the silver mines. We lost much but gained an incalculable advantage over Olhav and Aramastun.
My thoughts on the situation? Well, it does seem like I’m assisting in barreling us toward the eradication of my own kind. On its face, that doesn’t seem too bright.
I have to trust my master and mistress—Skartovius and Sephania. I suppose my former master and mistress. They believe in some unified utopia between the cities, albeit with different ideas of what that looks like.
Sephania is hellbent on ending any crime, corruption, or wickedness in Nuhav. That is fine and dandy, though I don’t have the heart to tell her I think it’s impossible. I’ve doubted my little honey badger before and she’s always surprised me.
She also believes the vampires of Olhav play an outsize role in keeping the human chattel stuffed firmly underfoot in a perverse poverty cycle. I can’t say she’s wrong, I just don’t know how to fix that without, well, killing every last vampire and dhampir that walks the earth.
I would be included in that, which presents quite a conundrum for me.
Skartovius thinks snuffing out the Five Ministries—or Three Ministries, now—is our best bet to form this merging of ideas and lives in both cities.
I can’t say it’s a bad thing to get rid of the tyrants.
They’ve controlled commerce, faith, military, intelligence, and law for too long.
In staying high up in their ivory towers, they’ve lost touch with reality and the commonbloods of Olhav.
The Peaks are rife with rebellion and revolution. You can smell it in the air. In fact, I can smell it in the air right now, in the form of smoke and burning flesh.
If one thing is true, it’s that violence has always been the answer in both cities. If the rabble-rousers get too rabbly or rousey, throw some fresh meat at them and watch their attention shift. Suddenly the ones they’ve been fighting against are their saviors—the ones fighting for them.
One can never place too much trust on the intelligence of the mob. They will astound you with their about-faces and idiocy at every turn.
While I ponder my new existence—and arguably my approaching end of existence—I decided to take a walk out of the Firehold. It’s far too stuffy in there, especially with the turmoil of so many working bodies trying to get this Silverblood concoction out to the masses.
No one even notices me leave, which is just as well because I’ve needed some time to think in peace. I’m a new man now. A new half-man. I’ve had some days to experience life as a thrall-less dhampir freed from the confines of possession by Skartovius Ashfen or Sephania Lock.
I still love them both dearly. But Skar has been cut out of my brain completely.
My pull toward him is no longer visceral or needful.
I crave every long inch of the nobleblood bastard, no doubt, though it’s a different sort of craving than I’m used to.
This one, I can resist. And no one can force me to oblige.
I almost don’t know what to do with such liberty.
I haven’t felt it in so many decades, I hardly know what it’s supposed to feel like.
With Sephania, my connection to her bloodbond still exists, though purely on a spiritual level.
Our souls are entwined because we love each other as mates.
Our bodies fit together because we’re meant to grind and slide and rut.
But our minds have lost the attachment they had after I first tasted her Loreblood.
It’s interesting, the Silverblood “elixir” is having a profound effect on reversing the power of Seph’s blood inside me, despite its base ingredient being her Loreblood. Perhaps it’s the silver aspect tearing away my mistress’ bond, neuron by neuron.
I tap my chin in thought, sighing at the sight before me. My nostrils wrinkle at the offensive scents of the burning wood, the black smoke, and the cooked flesh.
The Bronzes have just put on a display for the masses. They’ve burned three supposed witches in the biggest town square in the city, just north of the Firehold. The lawmen burned the three women together, I imagine to cut down on the cost of lumber.
The smoking entrails, sizzling flesh, and ashen skeletons of the crispy herbswomen can still be seen a hundred paces in front of me. Their bodies are gone but the posts they were chained to remain erect like hard cocks at dawn.
Between me and the burning bundles, nearly a thousand people bustle and bristle and cheer at the fiery executions. Starving neighbors, poor tradespeople, and folk who would have waved a good morning to those three poor women just a week ago.
Now, the public’s bloodlust is fueled. These women stemmed from three generations of the same bloodline: a grandmother, mother, and daughter.
Allegedly, the heretics represented the evil magics of the vampires while falsely representing the goodliness of the humans.
Funny, that, considering none of them were vampires, and the young daughter had only seen thirteen bleak winters.
It’s all nonsense, of course. I believe the truth is closer to the fact the mother slept with one of the Bronze commanders, and the political wife of said Bronze commander discovered the affair and demanded bloody revenge, or else his adultery would be revealed to the public.
To make matters worse, the witch-adulterer was also pregnant with the Bronzeman’s spawn, so really, the political wife got rid of two problems at once here.
I learned all this through some sneaky beast-charming an hour ago, listening through a mouse’s ear in the statehouse where the witches were held, as Bronzemen jailers gossiped about the reason for torching these women.
The entire macabre event was blessed, ordained, and permitted by Archpriest Cullard, who called the girls heretics, blasphemers, Damned-lovers, and so forth, without ever personally knowing them.
That’s another goodly man who I suspect is hiding deep, dark secrets.
The fact my little honey badger might be related to the priest’s deep, dark secrets dismays me and makes me crave violence just like the audience in front of me craves it.
It’s interesting how, if you peel back the veneer of honor and dignity and righteousness, every fucking person here is guided by their darkest urges and base desires, and they merely seem to mask them for self-preservation, pretending at civility until it’s no longer necessary.
Once the mentality of the mob infests and infects, and they show they can be who they really wish to be because everyone else is doing it, then those masks are tossed aside “for the greater good.”
Because everyone watching these misguided executions can’t all be wrong or wicked, right?
I also find it fascinating how these thoughts come to me so seamlessly, as if on a cloud streaming through my mind, waxing philosophical in a way I never experienced when my mind was held prisoner by Skartovius Ashfen.
In short: I think, overnight, I’ve become smarter. The concept makes me giggle as I watch the end of the burning with my hood pulled low, standing in the shadow of an alcove off to the side of the audience.
The wind is strong and stiff this dreary twilight, blowing the smoke around and making sure everyone in attendance gets a heady noseful of the burning ladies’ remnants. Overhead, the sun sinks behind the mountain’s jagged teeth, painting the sky orange and bloody.
I have to squint, even though there’s no sunlight currently present, and my skin is starting to itch. It probably wasn’t wise of me to step out from the shadows to attend this late-afternoon ceremony, but I was bored. Plus, the sun doesn’t torch me as swiftly as it does a fullblood vampire.
Wouldn’t that be comical? A threesome burning up front, only for a solo incineration to burst into crackling existence behind the audience a few minutes later? Talk about stealing the archpriest’s thunder.
I’m just ready to turn around and leave, feeling my lungs are sufficiently doused in witch particles, when the next stage of the event begins.
Two hooded executioners with mean axes on their backs bring up a stumbling, also-hooded man from the ground level, propping him up on the stage.
They tear the hood off and I see it’s none other than Vanison Shirin, staring blankly at the crowd.
“Oh, that was fast,” I mutter, curiosity piqued.
I’m surprised his trial was concluded so quickly—he was only snatched from our meeting with the other power players a few short nights ago.
Then again, I’m sure Silversmith Vanison got about as much of a trial as the three women before him onstage got.
Some of the audience members recognize Vanison.
Others look around and shrug to their friends, not sure what this man’s crime has been.
He doesn’t look like a greasy vampire. Doesn’t seem like he has long fangs or bags of girls he’s trading to other people.
To most, his criminal enterprise of silver weapon-making, production, and exportation, is a complete mystery.
Ohh, maybe they’ll claim he stuck his cock in the grandmother from before, so he’ll have to be killed, obviously, because he’s guilty of witchcraft by association! I start to make silly little wagers in my head about what they’re going to tell the audience Vanison is dying for.
In the end, it’s the boring truth: silver manufacturing and selling while it was an illicit operation.
I notice the audience getting a bit squeamish at this explanation from the Bronzeman reading the scroll. They don’t like it, because they support the Silverknights. How could Vanison’s activities be illegal without the citizens’ activities and support being illegal also?
In a breathtaking moment, I see the mask of civility, honor, and dignity fall over the faces of the thousand-throng like it had never gone away. It’s marvelous, the about-face.
It’s not Archpriest Cullard reading off the tale with fiery exhortation like he did for the witches. It’s an armored Bronzeman, as if he’ll be getting the flak for this execution if it goes awry in the public’s eyes. Archpriest Cullard is gone from the stage. Probably to go sell some silver.
The execution has all the usual rhythms, and I tilt and sigh as one of the beefy hooded executioners draws his hooded axe.
The other shoves Vanison forward—whose arms are tied behind his back—and bends him over the beheading block.
They say some small words to him I can’t hear.
He spits on the ground at one of the executioner’s boots, which makes me smile.
The beheader lifts his axe high and dramatic, and the other one takes a position so he won’t get his fingers chopped off along with Vanison’s head.
Blood spurts before it’s meant to, I think, from the executioner’s neck. “Wrong neck,” I mumble, standing a bit straighter and crossing my arms.
The executioner wobbles in place, axe heavy in his raised arms, and his hooded comrade looks up from his crouched position—
Only to get the head of the axe accidentally buried in his skull, splitting it wide open. Brains and bone spill out, the audience gasps in horror, and the executioner drops his axe and grabs at his throat, eager not to die like his friend just has.
Another arrow punches into his chest, more blood splashes, and then another in his shoulder, spinning him around. He collapses with a heavy thud on the stage.
The gasps from the audience turn to screams.
I raise my eyebrows, pouting.
Bronzemen rush for the stage via the two staircases on either side of it, leading up from the ground level.
A shadowy figure stands at the roof to my right, high up where most people in the audience can’t see him. He raises his bow straight ahead, to the building at the other side of the town square, and plunks a Bronze archer there with a nicely timed shot.
The Bronze archer stumbles, trips, and falls about thirty feet from the building he was guarding, directly into the center of the audience.
The shadowed figure jumps from an incredible height and length—one might call it a supernatural height and length—from the roof to the stage where Vanison is darting his head back and forth, still on his knees at the beheading block.
The crowd circles around the dead archer in their midst. Bronzemen plunge into the audience and fists are thrown at the unruliness of it all. The shadow bowman, with his hood low like mine, draws swords and meets the Bronzemen on the stage with his blades valiantly singing.
Now the audience is attacking the Bronzes, who they were attacking just last week before the truce was called.
It seems things are right where they left off.
I wonder if some of them are Silverknights incognito, but all I know is there’s blood in the audience, shrieking and shouting, people being cut down at the stage, and that powerful shadow-fighter protecting Vanison ‘til the end.
Protecting his brother.
Because who else could that be than Vanison’s vampiric sibling, Indokkus Shirin, coming to his rescue?
The crowd turns into a riot. Stampeding feet, dust joining the smoke and burning air, the torched flesh, while Indokkus snags Vanison with one arm, eviscerates a Bronzeman’s belly with the other, resulting in a pool of spilled guts on the stage, and then disappears behind it with Vanison in tow.
“Oh my,” I mutter, clicking my tongue. “That took a turn.”