Blue Crystal
Chapter One: Vastii in Black (part i)
The scene was illuminated by Rylan’s glass-and-bronze lamp, which shed a steady orange glow interrupted only by the framing of the glass panes. Small orange circles from the lamp’s ventilation drifted over the ceiling and Rylan’s gloved hand as he held the light aloft in the small cave-dwelling. The dead man laid face down in a pool of his own partially frozen blood.
This was the first thing he had noticed when he entered the dwelling. The body wasn’t wearing a fur coat or trousers of any kind. There was an inner jacket and a knit sweater still on the body, and the pants had been removed after he had died, evidenced by the twisted, contortionist pose that his legs had been moved into. The right leg had a deep horizontal cut just below the knee, but no blood ran from it: just bits and pieces of frozen pink muscle tissue scraped rudely aside to make the cut. One arm was outstretched and twisted, and there was more frozen blood on the fingers of the gloves. Rylan’s medical training immediately wondered how he had died, but without seeing any wound on his back it would be impossible to tell without turning the body over and examining him. Rylan wouldn’t do that. Touching a murdered man was bad luck.
The second thing Rylan noticed in the room was the still-burning tallow candle and the living figure behind it. This man tried to crouch down into the shadows to hide from Rylan’s lamp. It was as though, Rylan thought, this fellow had decided that if he stayed very still, he might not be noticed, though the cave was so small he might have walked its length in only a few seconds. Several rolls of fur—the trousers and missing coat—had been set beside him and wrapped into small parcels with string. When the live man saw Rylan looking at him he held out the pitted iron axe that he had been using to hack the dead man’s leg off: a threat, but not one that impressed Rylan.
Rylan reached down to move aside the thick outer coat that he wore with his free hand, and altered the position of his lantern so that he could show this man clearly the hilt of one of his two steel swords. The metal was of fine craftsmanship: a graceful line ran from the pommel, which held a large bloodstone in its center, to the leather-bound grip, and the small hilt revealed that the sword was crafted in the Mordache styles. The man lowered his axe at once and moved back further against the very end wall, as if he could somehow pass through it. “I didn’t kill ‘im. I swear it!” he protested, and raised up a hand encased in a ratty leather glove, palm out. “I just found him like this, an’ I thought… you know…”
Rylan nodded, just once. He dismissed the man as unimportant, and looked back down to the dead body. “You should leave,” he answered through the thick wool of his muffler.
The scavenger blew out his candle immediately, which made no visible change to the illumination in the room, and he gathered that up with his fur parcels. Then he hesitated, axe in hand. “… What about the leg?”
“Leave it,” Rylan answered.
“But… but… see. That there’s good meat…” he hedged. “It’d only take a moment.”
“The clothing isn’t enough? Don’t be greedy. Just go. Now.”
The man lowered his head like a scolded dog, backed up a bit, and walked not to the door but around the entire cave, always facing Rylan until he came to the little tunnel out, carved as small as reason allowed. Rylan heard him struggle with the heavy manhole that covered the entranceway, and he did not put it back once he’d worked it open. A frigid draft wafted up through the opening. Rylan tried not to be annoyed at the extra chill, and instead crossed the room, giving the body a wide berth to avoid touching it. He went to the little cubby holes carved in the stone walls, things where people who lived in caves like these kept their possessions. He found tacky-string, an extra blanket that the scavenger seemed to have missed, packages of jerky. Inside an insulated icebox he found frozen meats and preserved underground vegetables, a case of cheap sap-wine, and, for some reason, a small knife that seemed to have been buried beneath a package of meat. Rylan set the cover back over the ice box and continued searching. He looked over the ventilated fire pit and among the ashes of the things burned there. He searched the little bunk where the dead man had slept, through the actual blankets. He even patted down the lumpy mattress.
Only when Rylan had finished looking in every conceivably possible hiding place within the tiny stone apartment did he turn to the dead man himself. He was still there, still held his limbs in that unnatural, twisted position. He was also still missing his trousers. Rylan just was thankful that he was laid face-down.
The question was, bad luck or not, could he afford to not search the body itself? Rylan had been hoping that it wouldn’t come to that. Now it didn’t seem that he had a choice. He decided to cheat bad luck by technicality instead, grabbed the corpse’s inner jacket by the collar, and pulled on the cloth, angling the dead man up and twisting him around. The cloth tore somewhere. Rylan felt his handholds becoming less effective, but he deposited the man on his back before the cloth was ruined, panting slightly from the effort, and looked over him, at his face, his stiff, frozen body, then his chest. The shirt had been torn open, and not by him. The jacket was undone and the sweater slashed. Black and silver chest hair had frozen in the pink ice.
The wound was made by a knife just below the sternum. He had been killed quickly, efficiently, and not by the scavenger with his dull axe. Rylan’s eyes lowered to a black, gummy mark stamped onto his skin below the wound that was partially obscured by the ice. Rylan drew his sword and scrapped the skin until he could see the mark. His mistress would want to know about this.
The symbol was of a black, sticky substance that clung to the flesh more fiercely than the ice. It depicted a pair of eyes inside a triangle, a sword imposed down the center. On the left of the triangle was a skulking heraldic dragon, long and serpent like with whip-like whiskers. On the other side were hatched lines that commonly represented stars in Vastii.
Rylan dropped his lantern. He fumbled, sheathed his sword, then realized that he couldn’t leave the lantern there and wasted a precious moment stooping to his knees and grabbing at the iron ring. He leaped for the entrance way of the abode, sliding along the thin tunnel to the open cover and shoved himself through into the long, dark, twisting tunnel. When he didn’t see anyone there, he ran and blew out his light, leaving himself to navigate the corridors blindly, holding his hand against the wall and relying on touch to keep him from injuring himself.
Had he been seen? The thought spurred his movements and didn’t let him rest. He moved deeper and deeper into the caverns, away from the Pit. It seemed likely now, in his panicked state. Perhaps he had given the scavenger too good of a look at his swords, even if the temperature out here required him to operate with his face covered. His business there would have looked suspicious. He could feel eyes on him in the darkness, though there was no light to see, perhaps someone following silently behind.
Rylan became rational further on, turned around, and went back the way he came. Running in the dark would only get him lost. Yes, it was possible that his presence in that cave had been noted. The king’s secret police may or may not have been watching. But Rylan knew a way to escape notice.
The city of Vastii was built below the ice and snow of the dark surface world, around a deep fissure in the earth that had been worked and shaped by the inhabitants until the hole was vaguely circular and lead down near the flow of an active volcano. The only part of the city that was above ground was the palace itself, and the white stone towers poked up like knives to the sky. Below that and above most of the informal entrances to the palace was a cap, a thick, man-made plug covering the Pit and blocking the inhabitant’s view of the stars. Access from the top to the bottom levels of the Pit was granted by the ridges carved around the side, spiraling down around the edges of the deep hole down to the bottom. Stairways, private tunnels moving off were also not uncommon.
Rylan was not at the bottom of the Pit, but he was close to it. He found a set of narrow, dangerous stairs and descended them, going down and down. As he went he began to meet other people walking out on the street, and as the heat of bodies grew so did the rank smell. At the very bottom of the pit, below everything else was a large open area where the common people moved around and did business. One brown fur coat looked just the same as every other, and Rylan simply waded among them. Finding someone who didn’t want to be found at the bottom was the hardest thing in the world, even for the police in their silver masks. He lingered until he was certain that he had lost any hypothetical pursuit. Then he began the long climb back up and around the city.
