Location: Beneath the Streets of Fubar
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Fall
There is a particular kind of arrogance that only a doomed kingdom can afford, and I have always found it delicious to watch from a safe distance — preferably with a goblet of something red in hand. Fubar, in her final gasping act of imperial vanity under Diked and Ramssee, had ‘upgraded’ her sewers with the same care and cunning she’d once poured into her newly renovated ramparts, spires, newly gilded throne room. The sewars are, I think, the most honest thing any ruler ever builds — the one part of his kingdom he never expects a living soul to see, and therefore the one part he never bothers to lie about.
The Azoras, of course, were not there to admire the architecture. They were there to survive it.
Before they initially descended, Nathily had done what her instincts demanded and what Emcorae, in his fury, would never have thought to do — she’d knelt at the tunnel’s mouth and simply listened, reaching out with her elvish instincts to test the air and the stone for the particular wrongness that clung to the place as a result of the plague. Luckily for them she found only ordinary rot. Whatever horror the Husking Sickness had visited on Fubar, it did not linger in standing filth — it rode the breath of the living, and the dead it left behind crumbled to husks and ash long before they could foul the water. Although they didn’t know it, Ramssee, in his paranoia, had seen to that much himself, burning what he couldn’t hide. Small comfort, given everything else waiting for them below — but comfort nonetheless — and one which allowed them to actually proceed ahead with their plan.
Moving forward, they quickly discovered that the tunnel narrowed as it wound deeper, forcing them low and then, in stretches, nearly to a crawl. The walls wept a slow, black moisture that soaked through cloth and leather alike, and the air thickened with every yard until breathing itself felt like a transaction — a held breath traded for one more step forward. Emcorae led with one hand trailing the stone, feeling for the subtle shifts in texture that might warn of a drop or a side passage before his boot found it the hard way. Nathily followed close behind, close enough that she could hear the tight, controlled rhythm of his breathing — a man holding himself together by sheer force of will, one lungful of foul air at a time.
It was slow, wretched work, and I imagine that a great many uncharitable thoughts about Bram, peasant miners, and the general indignity of infiltrating one’s enemies through his own sewage crossed both their minds in that stretch of crawling darkness. Twice they startled at sounds that turned out to be nothing more sinister than water finding a new channel through old stone. Once, Nathily’s hand closed on something in the muck that her fingers identified, with a small silent horror, as bone — animal, she told herself, and did not examine it closely enough to be certain. The tunnel did not care for their comfort, and offered none.
It was perhaps forty yards in, in a stretch so black that Nathily had lost all sense of how far they’d come, that Emcorae’s groping hand met not stone but rusted iron.
“Blocked,” he hissed, tracing a lattice of corroded bars sealed into the tunnel’s throat, flakes of ancient metal crumbling to rust beneath his fingers.
“Let me look.” Nathily crowded in beside him, running careful hands along the seams. “Old mortar, but not rotten through. Might take an candlemark with the right tool, but quietly, we could—”
She never finished the thought.
The Break
I have written before, and will no doubt write again before this Apocrypha is through, of the particular madness that lived in Emcorae at this time — a madness born not of any curse or possession, but of the far more mundane and far more devastating sort: grief left to fester, purpose curdled into obsession. It reared its head at the strangest moments, and it reared it again now, in a black tunnel forty yards beneath a plague-ridden capital, with nothing more provoking than the word candlemark.
A candlemark. A candlemark of crouching in the dark and the stink while somewhere above him, in some gilded chamber he had never seen, King Diked Dinus drew breath and walked free. A candlemark was an eternity to a man who had already spent months measuring his life in the space between one grave and the next — Lynsy Finch’s, his family’s, Dugan Finch’s, and however many more waited to be dug before this was through. Something in Emcorae simply — snapped.
He didn’t announce it. He didn’t warn her. He simply drove his shoulder into the grate with the full, unrestrained weight of every league he’d ridden and every grave he’d left behind him, and the rusted iron — weakened by damp and neglect, never designed to withstand the fury of a man who had stopped caring whether he lived to regret it — gave way with a shriek of tearing metal that seemed, in that enclosed stone throat, loud enough to wake every corpse in Fubar’s plague-pits.
“Emcorae!” Nathily’s whisper was a blade of pure fury. “Are you mad—”
But the damage was done. The grate had torn free of its lower hinges and swung inward on a single stubborn bolt — and there, by what I can only call the first mercy either of them had been shown all day, it lodged fast against a jut of stone in the tunnel wall, groaning but holding, rather than clattering loose entirely into whatever lay beyond. No great crash of falling iron. No ringing peal to carry up through the sewage grates and into the ears of some drowsy sentry above. Only that single, awful shriek, already fading, swallowed by stone and distance.
For a long, terrible moment, neither of them breathed.
But then – somewhere far above — muffled, but unmistakable — came the crunch of boots on cobblestone! A patrol, walking the street directly overhead, their voices carrying down through some unseen grate in low, bored murmurs of men counting the candlemarks until their watch ended.
They were surely about to be discovered!
Nathily’s hand shot out and clamped over Emcorae’s mouth before he could so much as exhale, dragging him bodily back against the tunnel wall, into what little shadow the darkness afforded. Her own heart was a war-drum in her chest, her falchia held rigid and ready, though ready for what, in a stone tube barely wide enough to turn around in, she couldn’t have said.
The boots passed directly above them. Paused — one agonizing, eternal moment — and mercifully passed again, the murmured conversation soon drifting away into the evening with no more urgency than before. Whatever sound had reached them, it seemed, had been dismissed as nothing more than the ordinary groan of an old city settling into its own decay.
With a heavy sigh, Nathily let her hand fall from Emcorae’s mouth. In the dark, she couldn’t see his face, but she could hear the ragged edge of his breathing, and beneath it, something that might almost have been shame.
“We are not doing that again,” she whispered, each word carved from ice. “Do you understand me? Next time you want to announce our arrival to the entire capital, you can do it without me standing beside you.”
Emcorae said nothing. There was, in fairness to the young man, nothing to say. And I will note — though I doubt either of them noted it themselves, so consumed were they with the immediate business of not dying — that this was becoming something of a pattern between them. Emcorae acted. Nathily survived it. It was, I confess, not a partnership built to last, though I suppose that’s rather the point of the tale I’m telling you.
Not wanting to spend any more time in this hell hole, the warriors quickly squeezed through the ruined grate one at a time, Emcorae first, then Nathily, into a wider chamber that told them at once they had reached their destination — though reached is perhaps too dignified a word for what awaited them.
The sewer center of Fubar was less a room than a cathedral built in mockery of one: vast, vaulted, ancient stonework arching overhead into a darkness the eye couldn’t penetrate, supported by pillars slick with filth. A sluggish channel of black water ran through its heart, fed by a dozen smaller tunnels bleeding in from every direction, each one a tributary of the city’s collected waste. The stench was a living thing, thick enough to taste, and Nathily pressed the back of her wrist to her nose while Emcorae, to his credit, merely set his jaw and said nothing.
[Here, I confess, is where I cannot resist a small observation of my own — one which I suspect neither Azora paused to consider in that moment, crouched ankle-deep in a kingdom’s collected filth. Every gilded throne in every gleaming palace ever built by mortal hands sits, quite literally, atop a chamber exactly like this one — a foundation of waste and rot dressed up above in silk and self-importance. Kings love to speak of their divine right to rule from on high. They speak far less of what runs beneath their feet to make that height possible. I find it, on the whole, rather apt. I have known several gods who could stand a similar lesson — and at least one, I’ll admit, who has occasionally needed reminding that even the grandest throne is built on something considerably less noble than its occupant would prefer to advertise. Not that I would name names. A gentleman does not name names. But you may draw your own conclusions, and I suspect you’ll draw the correct one].
A faint light glimmered ahead of them. It wasn’t a flicker, but instead an actual light – torchlight in fact. There was no mistaking that it was filtering down through a grated shaft that Nathily guessed must open somewhere within the palace grounds proper. Voices, distant and indistinct, rose and fell above it: the ordinary murmur of a city’s underbelly going about its business, oblivious to the two intruders crouched in the muck below.
“There,” Nathily breathed, nodding toward a heavy door set into the far wall, iron-banded and ancient, the kind built to keep the city’s filth from wandering where it wasn’t wanted. “That has to lead up into the lower levels. If Bram was telling the truth—”
But an unexpected grinding creak cut her off words — the unmistakable groan of old hinges, coming not from the door she’d pointed to, but from a smaller passage to their left, one they hadn’t even marked in the gloom and which was closer to them – much closer.
Both Azoras went utterly still.
“Down,” Nathily mouthed, and they melted backward into the black mouth of the tunnel they’d just emerged from, pressing themselves flat against slick stone, weapons drawn, breath held.
Nearer torchlight spilled into the chamber, throwing long, wavering shadows across the vaulted ceiling. A figure stepped through the passage — cloaked, hunched, moving with the quick, furtive gait of someone who very much did not wish to be here and very much wished to finish whatever business had brought him even less.
The footsteps echoed once against the stone. Twice.
And then they stopped — close. Nearly right in front of them!
Who had come to disturb the peace of Fubar’s underbelly? What business did he have here, in this cathedral of filth, at this particular time? Perhaps it’s time to connect the dots for you…
The Apocrypha of Azazel 