Bound by Iron

Chapter EIGHTEEN

Idyllic, Not Peaceful

Zol, the 24th day of Sypheros, 998

Cimozjen stared at the warforged, aghast. “What was that for?”

“Minrah said it had to be done, and you said you could not do it.”

“But there was no reason to kill him!”

“Yes, there was,” said Minrah, who nonetheless shielded her eyes from the carnage. “People like that are like rabid rats. You can’t let a single one of them get away. If you do, they only-”

“One of them did get away, Minrah,” said Cimozjen. “Pomindras? Commander of the Silver Cygnet? Perhaps you remember meeting him once or twice. He ran off when he saw he was the last one standing.”

“So did the third one I faced,” said Four. “If I had known that fleeing was an option, I would have tried it once or twice during my battles. It is probably better that I did not know, for I did win all of my fights.”

“See?” said Cimozjen. “Two of the six already ran off! Here I had a chance to send a message back to them, but no, you had to get bloody handed! Not even you-you left it to him,” he added, jerking a thumb at Four.

“I’d rather be bloody handed than a pristine snob who can’t do what needs to be done! I swear, Cimmer, you’d let a troll eat your legs if it were using proper table manners!”

Cimozjen rolled his jaw for a moment, then wiped his sword on the cloak of one of the fallen and grabbed his staff. “Clean your axe, Four. Let’s move.”

He led them on their way, and after a short block or two, they left the zone where the magical fog held sway. Seeing only one or two other civilians in the distance, Cimozjen sheathed his sword.

“I tell you the truth, your perception is fundamentally flawed, Minrah,” he said. “You see my oaths as chains. You think they restrict me from doing things that I would otherwise normally do. Now I can understand that to a point. Even the name ‘oathbound’ brings to mind the trappings of slavery. But my oaths are not a fetter around my limbs, nor a yoke upon my neck. My oaths protect me, uphold me, and assist me to prevail. They are not a noose. Rather they are the straps that hold the armor of virtuous ideals securely in place, protecting my heart, my mind, and my soul. They are the firmly embedded nails that hold me together. They keep me upright, defend me against doing that which is indefensible, and they shield me from shame and self-loathing. Just like armor halts the blade that one fails to deflect, so do my vows halt me from the evils I might perpetrate when my guard is down.

“In short, Minrah, any warrior’s fury can get the better of him in the midst of battle. My oaths bind my highest ideals to me so that in the midst of rage or self-pity or bitter vengeance, I, unlike a certain other person, do not end up with my undergarments around my ankles.”

Minrah clucked her tongue. “Are you insinuating something?”

“I have no need to.”

“You’d better strap your lips, Cimmer.”

After a pause, Cimozjen nodded. “That was uncivil of me, and for that, I apologize.”

Minrah giggled. “Besides,” she said, waggling her eyebrows, “dropping my straps is my best weapon.”

Cimozjen shook his head and sighed. “You are a very beautiful young woman, Minrah, intelligent and energetic. So sad it is that when the day of your wedding comes, you’ll have nothing special left to offer your husband.”

“I’m special.”

“Your own actions speak otherwise of you.”

“I’m not going to get married, anyway,” said Minrah. “And at this rate, you’ll ever get me under the sheets.”

“On that we are agreed,” said Cimozjen, disappointed in spite of his better judgment.

“Ah. An agreement,” said Four. “Now that you are done with the requisite arguing, I have a question. When does the man come to repair me?”

The other two stopped. “What?” said Minrah.

“The man. When does he come to repair me? As I said earlier, I have a damaged neck and several severed linkages within my torso.”

“There’s no one who does that for you now, my friend,” said Cimozjen. “Come morning, though, we can find someone.”

“Why does he not find me? He always has every other time I have been damaged.”

Cimozjen gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder. “That’s part of being free, my friend. You get to take care of yourself.”

“That’s great!”

Minrah laughed. “I don’t much think so,” she said. “Life was a lot easier when my parents took care of me. I had hardly a care in the world.”

“I meant ‘great’ as in vast and powerful, because this state of being free impacts the entirety of my future existence and requires that I attend to my preservation and restoration in a way that I had not previously been required to do.”

Minrah rolled her eyes. “Whatever you say, Four.”

In the morning they found an artificer who was able to work on repairing Four. Cimozjen’s coin was running a bit low, but the artificer agreed to work in exchange for a promissory note from Cimozjen, drawn against the coffers of the Karrnath Temple of the Oathbound and redeemable from the moneylenders of House Kundarak. Granted, the artificer appended his usual bill with a hefty “runner’s fee,” but Minrah was nonetheless amazed that someone could garner such valuable services based solely on upon his word. Or, as she put it, “I’m going to have to try that trick.”

The artificer expected the work on Four to require the better part of the day, so Cimozjen and Minrah thought it would be a good opportunity for them to go enquire after the Valleau household and see what they might find out with respect to Torval’s shoes.

They chanced upon a greengrocer’s cart heading out the Galifar Gate to the local farmsteads. It was empty of anything save hay, which the driver had loaded to cushion the more fragile of the produce he intended to buy. With a kind word and a dazzling smile from Minrah, they managed to hitch a ride.

The autumn morning was very crisp and bright. Cimozjen and Minrah sat facing the rear of the wagon, away from the morning sun. The last of the hoarfrost evaporated from the fields around them, coiling wisps of mist demarking the end of its existence. Minrah huddled close to Cimozjen for warmth, and he spread his arm and cloak over her like a protective eagle. The sunshine on Cimozjen’s back was warm, but not enough to overcome the chill in the air, and as a result, Minrah kept herself pressed as close against him as possible. At such an intimate distance, the smell of her hair warred with the metallic bite of the nippy fall air, and eventually won.

For a long, quiet time, there was nothing but the rolling of the wheels across the flagstone road and the occasional nicker of the horse, who seemed ill-pleased to be walking into the rising sun. For his part, Cimozjen felt some measure of peace. The trip brought back memories of time spent with his wife decades earlier, when they were both young farmers in the awkward courtship of early adulthood. For a few moments he found himself feeling young again, with an attractive young maiden at his side and a vaguely idyllic future in store, the disorienting love of heady youth stirring within him …

Then the whole illusion came crashing down. The woman beside him was hardly a maiden, and her interest in him far lower than the lofty goals of the young Karrn lass of so many years before. Their marriage had been long since consummated, years before the shifting fortunes of the Last War had torn him from his family, his country, and his king. Their promising life together had been destroyed, overrun with slaughter, shame, imprisonment, and the obliteration of an entire nation. He wondered if he would ever see his wife again, if such a thing were even possible anymore.

His conscience told him to loosen his embrace of Minrah, release his grip on her vibrant, feminine, youthful presence … and her hold on him. Yet he was traveling to find the man who’d made the shoes in which a good and noble friend had been murdered as a slave, and he appreciated the company. Any company. Especially hers, so unlike anything else he had known since he last saw his wife, though a part of her charisma was the knowledge of how compliant she would be.

His heart knew he should pull away the protective embrace of his arm, but his brain argued against such a measure by using the protective codes of chivalry-he could hardly delight in making the young girl cold this morning-to keep himself in an embrace too intimate for a married man and a young lass who worried his oaths like a terrier with a bone.

Somehow it never crossed his mind that he should just loan her his cloak.

An hour before midday, they passed through the wooden gate and entered the Valleau fields. Cimozjen paced his steps with his pole, and Minrah had one arm slipped through his elbow.

“We’re here,” said Cimozjen as he shut and barred the wooden gate behind them.

“Let’s hope our luck holds,” said Minrah.

“Luck has nothing to do with it. Our being here is not the result of coincidence or chance. It was divine intervention.”

“Listen, Cimmer, even if the gods were of a mind to tinker with insignificant gnats like us-which they’re not-there’s no way you could say that for sure.”

“Yes, I can and I do. That was undeniably the effect of their influence. It’s an indisputable fact.”

“Indisputable?” asked Minrah, crossing her arms. “Then prove it to me.”

“You did not notice the beggar’s shoes,” said Cimozjen. “I did. Noticing them was the reward of the Sovereign Host for my devotion. In appreciation for my lifetime of devotion, the Host trained me to have the generosity to give to the needy, the humility to kneel beside them, and the compassion to look after their condition.”

“There. You just said you noticed the shoes yourself, because of your habits.”

“Habits given me by the holy teachings of the Sovereign Host. Intervention gets no more divine than that.”

“You’re annoying,” said Minrah.

They found the elder Valleau behind his farmhouse, whetting a cleaver while sitting against the bole of an old apple tree. A large decapitated pig hung by its rear legs from a tree branch, blood draining into a bucket that sat next to its vacant head. Minrah averted her eyes, then opted to wait on the other side of the house while Cimozjen questioned him.

“Good morning, fellow farmer,” said Cimozjen as he approached. “I hope I am not disturbing anything.”

Valleau looked up from his blade. “You don’t look like one,” he said.

“Pardon me?”

“You don’t look like a farmer.”

Cimozjen nodded ruefully. “Thirty years of military service will do that to a person. But I grew up on a farm not unlike this one. My father raised goats-fur, cheese, and meat. They’re much hardier than cattle.”

“And you sound like a Karrn.”

“I am. My father’s farm was near Vurgenslye, no more than two bow shots from the banks of the Cyre River.”

“Then you can leave,” Valleau said.

“Farmer Valleau, I came to ask a simple question regarding your second son’s handiwork, if you’ll allow me.”

The farmer spat. “I don’t.”

“And to pay you for your answers, if that is the only way I can merit your attention.”

The farmer said nothing, which Cimozjen took as encouraging. He pulled out the shoe from his haversack, kneeled a respectful distance away from Valleau, and extended his arm, holding the shoe. “Do I understand that this design here is your son’s mark?”

The farmer looked at Cimozjen’s extended hand, so he withdrew it, pinned a sovereign under his thumb where it held the shoe, and extended it again.

Seeing the flash of silver, one of the farmer’s eyebrows rose. He reached out, took the shoe and the coin, and tested the silver with his teeth. Satisfied, he tucked the coin inside his wide leather belt, then he turned the shoe over in his hands. “This is his mark,” he said with a nod.

“That’s nice work,” said Cimozjen. “A very sturdy shoe, yet I should imagine it to be fairly affordable, since it is simple of construction and plain of decoration.”

The farmer shrugged.

“I was hoping that you could tell me what sort of people purchase shoes like this,” Cimozjen said.

“Why, did you lose your other one?”

“It belonged to a friend of mine,” said Cimozjen.

“No surprise,” said the farmer. “The Custodians needed shoes for the prisoners. So I had my boy make them.”

“So who buys these shoes now?”

The farmer shrugged. “We stopped making them once the War ended,” he said. “No more need.”

“So all of these shoes your son made, you sold to the Custodians?”

“S’right.”

“But how did you handle that? The Custodians had groups all over the country, did they not?”

The farmer sighed deeply and glared at Cimozjen, making it clear that the interruption, silver or no, was taking too much of his time. “The Custodians had an overseer in Fairhaven, at the temples of the Cathedral of the Heavens. Friar Hannel by name. I brought them all there to him. What he did with them afterwards, I couldn’t give a pig’s eye.” He spat again, and resumed honing his cleaver.

Cimozjen withdrew and rose, then tossed another sovereign onto the ground beside Valleau. “I thank you for your time. You have been far more helpful than I could have hoped.”

The farmer nodded but didn’t look up.

Cimozjen left, idly wondering whether the farmer wanted to see his headless corpse dangling from his tree.