Chapter 5: A Balancing Act

Working for Lito Laeth was going to be a whirlwind.

Elaene Alkalae had woken up to find a hand written note on her bedside with a list of things that Lito wanted her to do today.

She picked up the parchment to examine it, only to find that there was a second underneath, with more requests.

Elaene rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. Were there any requests that violated her mandate of impartiality? She couldn’t tell in this state. She’d have her bath first, some tea, and read again.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

As she watched her attendant draw her bath, Elaene contemplated how silly the chain of service was. The attendant served her in the small everyday tasks that Elaene was now too busy to do herself. The attendant also served her family and husband, for all Elaene knew. Elaene served Aigean, the King in the Deep as one of his priestesses, but her main job was serving Lito Laeth in whatever she desired—as long as Elaene remained impartial to the endless political and military squabbles. Lito Laeth, in turn, served Fiach, the Lady of the Soil, as one of her followers, and assisted the King Enclosed with the protection of the city and of his person. Altor Caeton was king, but Elaene knew that he was a follower, and therefore servant, of Uisce, the Cascade Prince—which meant that he was duty bound to serve the other people that he was able. And since he was king, he was able, and therefore obligated, to serve a lot of them.

“I’m surprised that Lito was able to get this to me before I even woke up,” Elaene said. “I’m used to being the earliest riser.” She remembered her time in Ard-Abthen, when she would get up every morning before anyone else, go to the cliffs, and watch the sun rise over the ocean horizon. It was a sight she would never forget, and she couldn’t wait until her time of service was done and she could return to Ard-Abthen to teach and to watch the sun rise over the ocean.

“I think that Lito is still asleep, priestess,” her attendant said. “She starts to work fairly late in the day, but works up through the evening. She’s called the Sunset Knight for a reason.”

“I understand,” Elaene said. She smiled thoughtfully. “By the way, are priestesses allowed on the Wall in the early mornings?”

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

After reading the list, Elaene had decided that she was obligated to skip half of Lito’s tasks—all the one’s that pertained to preparing for upcoming war with the Carpenter.

As Lito’s counselor, she was bound to look after her emotional and spiritual health. She was trained in all of the four devotions, and could assist someone with their relationship with the gods. As she had offered the night before, Elaene was also willing to extend this gift to anyone in Lito’s forces, provided their counselor approved. She was even willing to perform mundane or simple tasks, just as her attendant was doing for her.

But Elaene was forbidden in taking direct part in the political turmoil. If, gods forbid, the Carpenter was to spring a successful coup, Elaene would dutifully offer her services to the commander of the Carpenter’s forces. She had a mandate to serve the position, nothing more. If the person in that position changed, either through the regular channels or through violence, it wouldn’t matter. She would serve them.

It wasn’t that simple, of course: the elders at Ard-Abthen preferred to send counselors of the matching gender to their charges. In a mixed group it didn’t matter that much: the Table in Invercard, her previous assignment, had both men and women on it. But in a one on one relationship, like serving Lito, the Elders had sent a woman. If Lito was replaced by a man, Elaene would only serve until Ard-Abthen picked a man for replacement. This was why her current position was such a wonder to her: Lito was the first woman commander of the King Enclosed’s forces in Caeledonia, and because of that, Elaene was the first counselor in such a role as well.

Elaene mused on this as she was lead, blindfolded, through the network of stone houses and passageways at Raven’s Run.

After she had gotten herself ready, she had visited the priest in charge of Lito’s forces in the morning and talked about Wrickon. The man was glad to have someone else attempt to help Dane, after spending so much fruitless time himself. He had warned Elaene, often, that talking to him was going to be difficult. After that, she had picked up a few reams of new parchment and more ink for Lito, and shopped for some of her own house needs. Once she was set up, she created the schedule for the soldiers for the next few weeks. A few of them had decided to stop following their particular gods. Some had already switched to new ones, but most remained undecided. These switches meant that certain soldiers were free from past obligations, had taken on new ones, and the schedule needed to be changed to accommodate that.

Changing one’s devotion wasn’t unheard of or rare. Young people tended to gravitate towards serving the Crone at the Cliffs, who desired her followers to amuse themselves constantly. Once the reckless lifestyle began to take its toll, they switched to one of the other three gods.

This didn’t work for everyone. Some of the lesser deities were reputedly downright jealous about their followers. Dotean, the Master with his Forge, was said to never forgive one who left his service—a grudge which continued all the way until the judgment during the Solemn Vigil. Few people were willing to jeopardize their chance to enter the King in the Deep’s silvery halls, so leaving Dotean’s following was rare indeed.

But Aer wanted all of her followers to make themselves happy, and presumed that their actions were all done with that singular goal in mind. If serving a different lesser deity would make her followers happy, she was said to be willing to allow it.

It was this angle that Elaene was intending to push in her conversation with Dane. Apparently, his problems with drunkenness stemmed the most out of a desire to make drinking be a pursuit that worked, instead of treating it as an evil habit to be avoided at all cost. Elaene suspected that this was mostly due to the mandates of the Plucky Mother to enjoy one’s life constantly—if drinking was something that made Dane happy, temporarily, it made sense that he would keep knocking his head against the same wall.

But for the present, Elaene was introducing herself to the King Enclosed.

Altor Caeton lived somewhere in the labyrinthine passages and caverns of Raven’s Run. It was said that the visible structures in the open were less than a third of the expanse of the place. Untold areas stretched into the cliffs and mountains on the edge of the Run. If one explored thoroughly enough, supposedly, she could find a seemingly endless staircase leading up through the mountains, and find themselves in Ard-Abthen’s famous Cliffcomb, another elaborate stone-carved network.

Children studying in Ard-Abthen told the same stories, but no amount of searching on the part of Elaene or any of her friends yielded the discovery of an endless staircase going down.

The attendants of the King Enclosed continued to prod her through the Run, guiding her steps so that she wouldn’t stumble or fall. She had originally guessed that they were getting deeper into the mountains, given that the temperature of the rooms had cooled, but then the air started to heat up again—suggesting that they were heading back into the open sun. Now the rooms were hot or cold, seemingly at random, and Elaene had decided that they were artificially changing the temperature to deny even that sense to the visitors of the King Enclosed.

Previous kings had not lived in such secrecy and isolation—but Altor Caeton was the King Enclosed, after all. Then again, no one else in recent memory had changed the structure of the island to the same extend that Altor had.

The attendants stopped her, and removed her blindfold.

Altor Caeton stood before her. He had a thinning beard, and owlish grey eyes.

She opened her mouth to say something, but he raised his hand.

“Do not introduce yourself. I do not know you yet. Because of the nature of your service and the necessity of secrecy, this will be the only time you see me. You satisfy the conditions.”

Altor turned his back on her, and strode over to his a stone table. He rummaged through a few things on his desk, and returned with a small stone object in his hand.

Elaene accepted it from his outstretched hand, and examined it. The rock was dark and clumsily carved, but its shape was unmistakable.

“A tower?” Elaene wanted to be sure.

“Yes. The last tower in my Braegan set. I have other pieces for other Gift Days, but not many.”

Elaene put it in her satchel. “Were you good?”

The King Enclosed laughed softly and shook his head. “I was terrible. But I wanted to contribute something to the games my family played, and so, one year, I carved this set for them. I watched them play the game with the pieces I had made, and it gave me more satisfaction than ever playing the game myself.”

“Thank you.”

Altor gestured her to be seated on one of the stone chairs. She did so.

“The formalities having been observed, we can begin.” He said this softly, but with a tiny hint of humorous grandness.

She grinned, and introduced herself. “My name is Elaene Alkalae, and I’m the new priestess sent to assist the leader of your guard. I previously served for the Table in Invercard. They loved me there.”

“I’m sure they did. You haven’t stopped smiling since we came in here.”

“It’s just… I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be informal; it’s just so exciting.”

Altor leaned back. He too was smiling now. “I suppose it would be, wouldn’t it? You will not find it so in a few days, I promise you. Has Lito been working you hard?”

Elaene explained the tasks that she had been sent on. As she came to her plans to visit Dane, she realized that perhaps giving such detail was not that great of an idea after all.

“There is a soldier in Lito’s force that is constantly drunk, and has problems with discipline?” Altor’s face darkened. “And she has taken no punitive measures whatsoever?”

“I didn’t say that,” Elaene hastened to say. “I just said that, um, the priest counseling her guard hasn’t been able to help that much. But that’s what I’m here for.”

Altor looked at her intently. “That is not what you’re here for. You are here to help Lito Laeth, not the men below her.”

“This is what she asked, and I have time to do both. Sir.”

Altor leaned back and smiled again, but there was a hint of ice behind it. “You don’t need to call me ‘sir’, Elaene. You are not subservient to me.”

“I just meant…” Elaene took a deep breath, considered her avenues of attack, and continued. “I just meant that, shouldn’t I be trying to help as many people as possible, if I have time?”

“Yes… and no. Do you know why I was such a poor Braegan player, Elaene? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. It was because I couldn’t grasp the idea of a sacrifice. I treated all of my pieces as equal, and went to great pains to save them all. This was something my family would exploit, and they would trap me every time. Do you know how Lito equips her spies?”

“No.”

“With as little information as possible. You might ask—wouldn’t it be frustrating, to be so in the dark about anything your commander does? Why, a common soldier might know more than you. And wouldn’t it be terrible, to not be able to not offer any somewhat useful information to the Carpenter and his forces? After all, how can Lito expect the Carpenter to confide in her spies if she gives her spies nothing to bait him with? She does this because she knows those men are a sacrifice.” He paused. “The Carpenter tortures Lito's spies terribly. Do you know how?”

Again, Elaene shook her head. This clearly wasn’t going to be one of those ‘give and take’ conversations.

“The Carpenter likes the stories to get out, for some reason. He thinks it increases his fear, and therefore his power—he is quite right about the fear, but it strengthens our people’s resolve against him as well. He is a fool. One of our spies had seen too much, so the story goes. The Carpenter tied him to a chair and put a pair of protective goggles on our friend—you know the kind, I’m sure, being from Invercard. Metal smiths use them for protection. They cover the eyes with special lenses which cut down on the glare and the smoke from the forge.”

Altor waved at an attendant for some water, and continued.

“The Carpenter removed these lenses, and instead attached a curious contraption onto the end of those goggles: a sizeable mesh globe, filled with burrowing wasps from the farmlands. He then proceeded to apply heat to the globe, by lighting fires on the outside. The mesh itself did not burn, of course, but the conditions inside began to get… unpleasant for the insects. The only exit was the goggles—and the man’s eyes.”

Elaene shuddered.

“The wasps burrowed through the man’s eyes and brain in order to escape the heat. He did not die quickly. And all this, because the man had seen too much. His punishments have an elegance about them; I would not deny him that.”

The attendant had produced the water, and Altor took a drink.

“But do you know the curious thing? That spy had absolutely no information of value. The Carpenter gained nothing from the torture, except, perhaps, personal satisfaction. Lito is counting on the Carpenter realizing this and stopping these obscene displays. It might work, it might not—we are not certain whether the Carpenter is rational, after all.”

“Where are you going with this?” Elaene said, more sharply than she intended.

“You asked whether you should help everyone. But you seem to lack how intricate and subtle such ‘help’ might look like. Would it be helpful for Lito to give tidbits of information to her spies? In the short term, perhaps. It would speed their entry into the upper ranks, and the like. On the other hand, it would encourage the Carpenter the spy might know more things after all, and continue his tortures. So in the long term, no.”

He took another drink.

“Is having a drunkard in the guard helpful for the rest of them? I doubt it. It brings down morale, encourages a lack of discipline, it is not good for the group. But what if this drunkard were cured? I will leave aside the question of whether it’s possible, but I will note that his own priest seems to think not. You would still need to enact some sort of punishment—otherwise, what consequences would deter his compatriots from exhibiting similar behavior in the future? Which is why, if it were up to me, I would send him to the Drain on the first caravan leaving Caeledonia. This man should be a sacrifice for the good of the group. I do find it curious that Lito has such a blind spot when it comes to the sacrifices she makes for her guard when she is so adept at making them elsewhere.”

The King Enclosed leaned forward to emphasize his point.

“We all must make sacrifices, Elaene Alkalae. And if people are unwilling to make small sacrifices for their own well-being and happiness… well, we must make those sacrifices for them, and remove them from the populace which they are dragging down.”

He motioned for the attendants. They walked forward, blindfold in hand.

“I trust we now understand one another, Elaene. I am glad to have had the chance to converse with you.”

The attendants helped her to her feet and had the blindfold on before she could think of anything to say. They lead her through back through the network of passages, and when they removed the blindfold she was standing at the entrance to the Run, looking towards the checkpoint and across the bridge to Cael Proper.

“Pompous ass,” she muttered, and walked towards the bridge to talk to Dane.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Dane wasn’t in his quarters when she visited the guard barracks. The other guards said that he was out on an errand, and that he would be back in a few hours or so. Elaene took the opportunity to tackle the next item on Lito’s list of tasks.

Raeden Clamore had been a spy for Lito Laeth, and had been missing for days. When Elaene had first read the task, she had thought for a few long minutes about whether asking around for clues would violate the mandate of impartiality. She had reasoned that it would not: she was finding a missing person, not taking an active role in the political struggle.

But after hearing the King Enclosed talk about the Carpenter’s methods, she was fairly certain that her mission to find the man would be unsuccessful.

Lito had detailed where Raeden had lived, at least. Elaene decided to go there, and to see if there was anything worth finding. Past that, she wasn’t sure what else she could do—she had a mental image of herself, dressed in priestess robes, brightly asking for Raeden in all the seedy bars she could find. Despite herself, she laughed a bit.

No, she needed to be far more subtle than that. She decided to head back to her quarters and change into a nondescript robe before she began her search. Perhaps her attendant would even have some suggestions of where to start asking questions. 

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