BECMI Chapter 58 – Of Ladies and Kings

The middle-aged human male dropped down from the top of the wall. He was definitely noticed, and just as definitely ignored. The fellow, clad in some outfit out of Elizabethean days or something, hose and lace ruffled collars and everything, paused carefully, giving us time to react to his presence or do something about him, and seemed quite relieved when nobody did anything, too busy eating their fill of a to bother with him.

I did note the precise and deliberate way he moved, observing that he was far, far more competent than his build and attire would suggest, and pinged him as a Fourteen!

He was also astute enough to deduce the one who was in charge. In spite of having a dragon sitting next to me and enjoying literally a ton of meat that had appeared just for her, he made his way in my direction, keeping his body language deferential even as his sharp eyes missed nothing at all.

Still, his relief when a zipped over and paused in front of him, then morphed into another black chair with a skull with roses in its eyes on the back of it, was quite apparent to me.

He sat down in it gingerly, and the floated over on the other side… right next to Cirru, as it amused me.

“Ketcher Kociba,” I greeted him in Dwarvish, and his eyes flashed comprehension. “Why are you bothering me, sir?” I asked him, while also handling him a goblet of fine red vintage.

Expecting a hit of wine, he almost spluttered instead at the sweet and smooth cherry juice. It was a breakfast, after all, and there was no alcohol at the table.

“Ah, you know of me, Your Ladyship?” he asked, brow furrowed, probably trying to place my accent.

“No. Your name is written on your soul, and I am addressing you by it. I am the Lady Edge. Do not make me repeat myself.”

There was absolute silence for a moment as every single person there turned to look at him in the same instant, none of their eyes too friendly. Then they returned to easy banter in their unknown tongues, seemingly ignoring him completely once again.

He was visibly sweating now. “Yes, my Lady,” he responded promptly. “Well, ah, it is like this. You are all persons of interest in the disappearance of King Antius of Darkmoor.”

“I see. And who is this King Antius?” I went on calmly. “Kings go missing all the time.”

He just blinked at my unmoved face. “King Antius of Darkmoor is the Lord and Regent of the North.” There was not the slightest amount of recognition on my face. “Forgive me, Lady Edge, but if you do not know of him, you must have come from… very far away.”

“To be utterly fair, Master Kociba, that is both true and not. We come from a great away. I, for example, come from nearly four thousand years in the future.”

He blinked, as I gestured at the groups arrayed around the table. “Sir Horn’s foursome comes from only a few years less. The Skifnersons and their band several decades before my own. Our most recent group was only the five members of Cymbr’s band there, seventeen hundred years in the future. We picked up no others on our backwards transits through time after that, for various reasons, and as you can see, that does not include your king.”

“Time, Lady Edge?” he asked hesitantly. “Are you certain of that?”

“Yes, Master Kociba, I most definitely am. That deathtrap of an Inn is wound about with temporal magic of a most dangerous nature, one that does not allow those who are not permitted by the magicks of the Inn itself or possessed of alternate means to exit it. That means that, in the future beyond the catastrophe that occurs ahead of you, there is no one and nothing to allow those who enter to exit.

“They are trapped within the Inn, with no way out, save for the Portal taking them back through time.

“And thus, back through time we have had to come. Over one hundred jumps, from decade to decade, century to century, peeling back the millennia of time, coming out into that basement… and almost always, directly into a fight for our lives, as only clearing the Inn of those who resided in it, or joining them to our cause, kept the chain of years going.

“Why, there was even a period where the Portal stopped manifesting at the full moon, in the wake of the Crimson Cataclysm. 467 turns of the moon it did not manifest, Master Kociba, and I was stuck in that Inn,

He stared at me, swallowing slightly at just the edge of iron in my voice. “But, but you left the Inn so easily!” he protested automatically. “Never has anyone been able to leave the Inn without the permission of the owner, and you just… walked out!”

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“I have other means, but the problem there is simple, Master Kociba. I saw you in the taproom, and no doubt you noticed that I tossed a coin ahead of me.” I flicked my fingers, and a copper coin was on my black-nailed fingertips, rolling across my knuckles back and forth deftly. “Just a coin, Master Kociba. A thing we tossed out at every stop, watching it.

“Watching it disappear as the weight of time eroded it away for stepping outside the Inn. Since all that coin was made of already existed in the past, it was wiped away. An object that could not exist in the same place at the same time as its past self.”

I let the coin vanish from my hand as he sipped at his drink. A fragrant loaf of warm buttered bread spun over into his other hand, was caught automatically. He was trying not to glance at Cirru as she swiftly and expertly stripped a whole ham slathered in pineapples and honey to the bone with artfully precise bites, clearly enjoying herself.

“Thus, none of us who went through the Portal could exit, as we would be wiped away by the tides of the past. That is, until we arrived here.”

“And the coin did not vanish.” He actually reached in his tunic and drew out the coin in question, displaying it in his hand. It was of Federyn issue, with a face and date on it he could not possibly know. “I do not recognize its make, and I am familiar with all the coinage of the Empire of Iberon, its provinces, and its neighbors.”

“The country which issued that coin will not exist for over thirty-five hundred years, Master Kociba, by which time the Empire of Iberon will be bare legends and scraps of history few care about but the scholars, Darkmoor a name only mentioned as once having existed, and its neighbors gone, swept away by ice and cataclysm and largely forgotten as well.” I gave him a coolly assessing gaze. “The books in the Inn that I read did give me a fair grasp of your current history, although no indication when we would actually arrive.

“Regardless, the least of the people about this table have been trapped inside that Inn for over a hundred days, and that is ignoring the nearly forty years they spent as stone when the Portal failed to open. If you had tried to prevent us from leaving when the coin showed that we could, things would have turned extremely violent.

“We are free of the prison of the Inn, and celebrating that freedom. Our days have been preparations for battle, and our nights have been murderous combat with all manner of enemies, ranging from dragons to undead and everything in between.” He could not help but glance at Cirru, who just snorted. “She is not the only one, of course. But she is the dragon who surrendered instead of fighting. The others did not.”

He bought time to think that through by devouring the bread (which was really incredibly good), looking over everyone’s garb, hearing the foreign language he did not recognize, the styles and mannerisms that simply were not familiar, even in passing, and he was extraordinarily well-traveled, it seemed.

“Well, then, I have merely two more questions then, I suppose.” He took another bite, looking thoughtful. “The first, easily enough, is what are your intentions now?”

“I speak for myself only. The loop in time is closed. I should be able to enter the Portal and return to the far end of the loop, namely my own time in the far future. My companions may choose to go with me, or to make their own way in your time and world, as they please. It would not surprise me if they chose never to enter that prison again.”

Buck was on my right, helping himself to eat far more than he should, but he bounced right to his feet and announced, “I will be following the Lady Edge!” he declared, puffing out his chest proudly and looking at me.

His three companions all jumped to their feet promptly, and the Northmen were right on their heels. “We will follow the Lady Edge!” Sir Horn announced, the words taken up loudly and fervently.

Prince Ukker, also slowly rose to his feet, pulling the dwarves to their feet, and the elves with them. “She promised to lead us to freedom or death, and she did not let us die!” the noble dwarf declared grimly, everyone around nodding and affirming his words. “The past is not free, it is already written. We return to the future, where our fate is our own, our choices our own, and where true freedom awaits us.

“There is no question. We follow the Lady Edge!” he declared, pounding the table, and the gesture was repeated by everyone, Cirru’s tail likewise smacking the ground as her claw did the banquet table in front of us.

I rose and lifted my goblet silently. They all scrambled to grab and fill theirs urgently. “Then one more leap, to true freedom! I will not let you die!” I promised them.

“FREEDOM OR DEATH!” they shouted, raising their cups with me, and sweet fruit nectar was as fine as any wine in that moment.

Master Kociba, his bread devoured, found a carafe in his hand filled with orange liquid, and prudently refilled his own cup from it.

He waited until everyone had sat back down, the cheerfulness of earlier replaced by a grim resolve.

“That does indeed answer my question,” he agreed carefully, sipping at the orange juice and visibly enjoying it. “There remains the second matter, which I believe will be of interest to you.” I regarded him evenly, waiting. “You spoke as if the Portal appears only intermittently?”

I nodded slightly. “It manifested very predictably during the three days of the full moon, Master Kociba. All of our trips were from one period of the moon to the next. Doubtless there were temporal events which also opened the Portal at random intervals in between, but they didn’t form a road, likely emptying into full moon nights as those who took them went backwards in time.”

“So it would be of interest to you that since our King disappeared nearly two months ago, the Portal in the basement of the Thisbean Inn has remained open.”

I slowly lifted an eyebrow, staring at him. “Someone has managed to forge a constant tunnel into another time? Most interesting. A connection across the centuries would keep the Portal active, but it is likely that without the proper control vector, those traveling it will be randomly sent into any temporal divergence along the way.

My eyes narrowed, and all the eating at the table stopped.

The gazes focused on Master Kociba were all ready to kill.