But why didn’t he just leave? Some unfinished business perhaps?
When Martanel reached the Ring, he explained the purpose of his visit to the warden, a large, scarified man with a perpetually cruel twist to his lip that was owing to a long, shiny scar.
“Aurelius, hmm?” The warden asked. “This way.”
The warden limped toward a dark, forbidding stairway that glowed vaguely red with coral. The stairwell wound down, every now and then coming to a landing, from which rose the sounds of human misery and despair. On one level the noise was particularly loud and animal sounding—and so was the smell. Martanel ventured a guess that that was where they kept the trolls.
When they reached the bottom of the stairway, the warden walked out into the shadowy corridor beyond. Here the noise was less, and the cells were all empty. The warden told him that this level, the bottom-most of five, was reserved for criminals, who were slated for immediate execution.
Finally, they came to a larger-than-average cell, and the warden stopped. The inside of the cell was darker even than the corridor and Martanel could see nothing beyond the bars except the faint red glow of coral, which did more to sharpen the shadows than to illuminate them.
The warden turned to him, keys faintly jingling from his hand, “You sure you want to go in? He’s locked up with the wolf man.”
Martanel smiled and thumped his trident against the deck. “I’ll be fine.” As it happened, a trident was a convenient disguise for a staff. It didn’t take much of an exertion of his abilities to shapeshift the one for the other.
Not knowing this, the warden gave him a dubious look and then walked to a nearby alcove. Martanel watched curiously until the warden withdrew a stick from a bucket of water hidden there. Tied to the end of the stick was a mass of writhing tentacles. “Just in case,” the warden explained as he fumbled with his keys in the rusty lock.
The door rattled open. Martanel made a move to enter the cell, but the warden stopped him with a hand across his chest. He was waiting for something. Martanel thought he saw a shadow moving. He peered more closely into the gloom, narrowing his eyes . . .
And flinched back just as a massive creature leapt out at them, all snarling fangs and glistening black fur. The warden set his feet, bracing for impact and held the stick out before him like a spear.
The leaping monster fell upon the tentacled creature. There came a sharp crackling sound and the furry beast yelped pitifully, its dark emerald eyes promptly rolling up in its head. It fell with a loud thump and skidded to a stop at Aurelius’s feet.
“That evens the odds,” the warden said with a snort. He gave the monster at their feet a sharp kick in the ribs as they entered the cell, just to make sure it really was stunned, then he shocked it again, and again, as though unsatisfied with the first result. Martanel watched with a frown. “Don’t kill him.”
“This beast has no need of your pity, but don’t worry, the effects will only be temporary. He’ll die in the ring like all the rest.”
Nodding slowly, Martanel moved through the dire gloom of the airy cell. When he reached the far wall of the cell, he found Aurelius sitting up on a stone bench, his eyes wide and blinking.
“I told him not to do it.”
“Perhaps you should have helped him,” Martanel suggested.
“What good would it do?” Aurelius asked in a bitter voice. “Everyone knows there’s no escape from Meria.”
“Your friend Gabrian seems to have found a way out.”
Aurelius shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”
Martanel frowned, sensing the truth in the boy’s answer. “Where is the relic?”
“I don’t know that either, but you were the one who suggested that the old wrinkle bag was impersonating me to steal it, so why are you asking me? Wherever he is, the relic won’t be far.”
“Yes,” Martanel nodded. “That is probably true, but Aurelius, he was brought to the queen this morning—dead. They threw his body to the sharks.”
“What?” Aurelius bolted to his feet. “But then—”
“The relic wasn’t on him, and the body wasn’t his, though he looked exactly like the one you know as Gabrian.”
Aurelius shook his head. “How?”
“How is any of this possible? Magic. You know you didn’t mate with the queen, or with the princess, yet they both think you did.”
“What do you know about magic?”
Martanel allowed his cover to slip for just a moment, and his youthful features were suddenly replaced by an old and wrinkled countenance.
Aurelius’s brow furrowed. “Gabrian?”
“Yes.”
“I’m confused.”
Gabrian dropped his voice to a whisper so the warden wouldn’t overhear. “You should be confused, Aurelius. Did you not think to wonder why, if you were chasing Malgore all this time, he didn’t simply use the relic as he supposedly planned to? In the time you spent chasing him, he could have been to the past, spent a lifetime there, and returned—all in the blink of an eye.
“Whatever purposes he has for the relic, they would not have been hindered by your pursuit. No, Aurelius, the one you were chasing had no use for the relic but to keep it away from those who
would
seek to use it. The one you were chasing was me.”
Aurelius’s eyes widened. “But then . . .”
Martanel nodded. “You have been helping Malgore all along.”
“Wait, if Malgore has the relic now, why doesn’t he just use it as you suggested?”
Martanel shrugged. “I suspect because such a powerful use of magic would pinpoint his location and I would come for him. My best guess is that Malgore wants to be safe in Gremlindom before he activates the portal.”
“Why does he want the relic anyway?”
“Why does an evil man want anything? Power. He thinks he can find things in the past to help him rule the present, to defeat both Elves and men.”
“But he told me himself that no one can travel to the past in order to alter something, because the minute you do, you’ve undone your reasons for travelling back in time.”
Martanel shook his head. “I don’t understand his motives myself, but he must have found a way, or else he wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to find and steal the relic.”
They were interrupted by a growl and then another crackling sound. Martanel turned to look. He’d forgotten the warden was there. The rough, scar-faced man was paying them no attention, but his inattention was too focused to be real. He had to be listening in. Martanel looked away and studied Aurelius thoughtfully. “You will help me recover the relic.”
Aurelius gave a long-suffering sigh. “Déjà damn vu. In case you hadn’t heard, I have some more immediate problems.”
“Yes, you are to be executed tonight. If you help me, I’ll help you.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“For a start, I’ll get the princess back on your side.”
“How will that help?”
Martanel smiled cryptically. “You’ll see.”
“Okay, fine, I’ll help you—assuming I’m still alive to do so.”
“Leave that to me,” Martanel said, turning to leave. Then something occurred to him and he stopped. “Aurelius—one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been wondering about something; perhaps you will know the answer. It makes sense that Malgore would disguise himself as you and lay with the queen to get access to the relic, but why did he lie with the princess as well? What did he stand to gain from her?”
Aurelius thought back. “The princess came to me offering me a way out of my sudden commitment to the queen. She said I could sleep with her and she would challenge the queen for me. She would make a trip to the surface to find an appropriate challenger. I suppose the idea was that then she and I could be together, but I wasn’t interested.”
“Wait, you said she was going to take a trip to the surface to find a challenger?”
“That’s right, before the queen discovered us.”
“So that’s how Malgore was planning to escape. . . . We must keep a close watch on the Launch. He will probably try to escape that way again.”
Aurelius watched as Gabrian—the real Gabrian—began leaving once more. Stopping by the warden, Gabrian frowned down on the weakly thrashing wolf, pinned as it was under the warden’s squid stick. “I’ve accomplished my purposes here,” Martanel said. “Let’s go.”
On their way back up the stairwell, Martanel thought to ask the warden, though he already knew the answer, “What did you hear of the conversation between myself and the prisoner?”
“Me?” the warden asked. “I heard naught but the crackle of my glochin stick.”
Martanel could tell he was lying.
“
Yesha ter carasha alsh erad.
”
Suddenly, the warden stumbled against the side of the stairwell with a hand pressed to his forehead. Martanel kept walking until he was a few steps above the warden, then he turned back as though with belated concern. “Are you not feeling well?”
The warden pushed off from the wall and shook his scarred head. “I . . . no, I think I’m just a little weak from hunger is all. What were we talking about?”
“Breakfast,” Martanel said, climbing the stairs once more.
The warden snorted. “Little wonder. I ought to get to that.”
“Yes, little wonder indeed.”
* * *
“I overheard you talking to Gabrian,” the voice was Esephalia’s.
Aurelius walked up to the bars of his cell. “What did you hear?”
“Everything. Is it true?”
“That I was helping Malgore? I guess so.”
“And now he has the relic . . .”
“Yes, but he doesn’t seem to want to use it.”
“That is good news for us, but we must get it back before he does.”
Aurelius sighed. “I don’t care who has the relic. I just want to go home and forget this nightmare.”
“As long as you are here, your fate lies here in Mrythdom. Nothing happens by accident, Aurelius.”
Aurelius smirked. “You wouldn’t say that if you’d been there. I stumbled through the portal in the dark, in the heart of . . . of a mountain of rock. It was a one-in-a-million accident.”
“Then you don’t believe in destiny?”
“What is destiny, but what we make of it?”
“What is destiny, but that which is ordained for us?”
“You’re telling me everything that happens, good or bad, is the result of . . . of what—some higher power dictating the course of our lives? I don’t buy it. Say I kill a thousand people tomorrow. Were my actions ordained by destiny?”
“Destiny is not a force for good or evil, it merely is. The future is fixed Aurelius, if it were not, you could not have travelled to it.”
“I . . .” It was hard to argue with that logic.
“Time is a straight line; there are no branches. Those branching curves only seem to be branching in the present. If you step outside the present for but a moment, you will see that every choice you make, every choice you have ever made, and those of everyone around you, were all perfectly predictable—pre-ordained by what they had already decided to do based on the influences in their lives at those precise moments. If you could relive a particular moment a million times with no extra knowledge, you would do exactly the same things over and over again.”
“But if I went back in time, knowing what would happen, I could change my destiny, couldn’t I?”
“No, you could not, because the very act of travelling back in time to change an outcome that you knew about would erase that outcome, and with it, your motive for travelling back in time. Time is fixed. It cannot be altered.”
“Yet the things I’m doing here in the future are changing the future from here on.”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s not fixed. The future changed the minute I was brought here.”
“But your coming here was no accident. It was your destiny to come here, and the future took your decisions and choices here in Mrythdom into account long before you were here to make them.”
Aurelius sighed. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“Rest then, Aurelius. You will need your sleep.”
* * *
Lashyla was asleep on her bed when the knock sounded at her door. At first she was confused. Then she was angry. Who dared to wake her? She hadn’t summoned anyone.
Lashyla strode to the door with a scowl. “What?”
“Begging your forgiveness beauteous princess, but I didn’t expect you to be sleeping at this hour.”
“What business is it of yours when I choose to sleep?”
“Only that I have important news for you—about Aurelius.”
The princess’s expression darkened still further. “Is he dead?”
“No.”
“Then I couldn’t be bothered to hear of him.”
“A thousand apologies for my boldness, but I questioned him thoroughly, and he neither slept with the queen nor stole the relic from her. He is innocent, and your mother, the queen is lying.”
Lashyla’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know this?”
“I was her witness, as you know, but I was sworn to secrecy. I cannot contradict her version of events without being killed. She would call upon any of a dozen other guards to counter my ‘lies’ with her ‘truth’ and I would be condemned to death.”
“Then you recant your testimony?”
“Yes, but only to you, only that you might know Aurelius has been unfairly sentenced and he does not deserve your ire.”
The princess’s eyes narrowed further. The Red Estheria still raging through her bloodstream whispered to her, giving her the dim echoes of insights she shouldn’t have otherwise had. The guard's motives were unclear, and there was something—a lot of things—that he was hiding about himself, but despite all that, the guardsman was telling the truth. Yet what to do with that truth? She felt all the fury and hate that she’d harbored against Aurelius shifting to her mother, and suddenly she knew what she would do.
“Thank you, guardsman. What is your name?”
“Martanel, my fair princess.”
“Well, Martanel, your loyalty to me will be remembered. I will keep our secret, but I must ask you one more thing: if Aurelius didn’t steal from my mother, then who did?”
Martanel merely smiled. “What would your mother do if she realized she couldn’t have Aurelius, if she realized she might lose him to another? What about the last man who ‘stole’ from her? He wasn’t guilty of the alleged crime, yet he was sentenced to death for it, wasn't he? The queen has spies everywhere. She must have known you were planning to challenge her for Aurelius. Rather than let you do that and risk losing him, she accused him of stealing from her and sentenced him to death for his crime.”
Lashyla’s eyes widened with horror and sudden revelation. How had she missed it? How had she not seen it coming? Her mother was not a graceful loser; Lashyla knew this better than anyone. “Thank you,” she said. “You may have saved an innocent man’s life by your testimony.”
Martanel bowed. “I live to serve, oh beauteous princess.”
* * *
“Lashyla, my sweet, to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”
Her mother was lying on a sunken ridge of coral in the coral gardens; her colorful tail lay glittering just beneath the surface. Lashyla stood at the edge of the pool and gazed dispassionately down on her mother. “You are in surprising spirits for one who has just condemned one of her mates to death, arguably her most beautiful mate yet.”
The queen sighed. “One does what one can to stay happy in spite of such things. He turned out to be a horrible, treacherous man. I cannot abide treachery. But you, my sweet, beautiful daughter, must be equally sad, did you not lie with him also? He deceived us both.”
“No, Mother, I believe you are the one who has been deceiving.”
The queen sat suddenly straighter, her tail flicking out of the water in sudden agitation. “Careful, daughter, what you accuse me of.”
Lashyla waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I have changed my mind. I wish to challenge you for Aurelius.”