For most of the Fourth Moon, Raya and Benn searched in a few of the outlying scribe’s shops, without striving deeper into the streets of the central city. Ith was a land of its own, Raya learned, but it was not a land unaware of the world at large. On every breath and on every road, there was talk of ill variety.
Raya heard curses against the rulers—there were eleven Mage Kings in Ith. There were refugees from Ellakar here, joining voice with the displaced people of Elpan. All blamed the Mage Kings.
To make matters worse, famine had come to Ith. Rayaand Dondar would scour the interior hills, and sometimes those beyond Ith’s outer perimeter for food; even out there, they found dead, rotting animals. Ash had poisoned them and smoke had made them ill. Mount Lukar’s pillar could not be seen from the hills in Ith, but the mountain of death spread its hand far across the land. The price of food in the markets was rising steadily and the number of men, women, and children with empty stomachs flooded higher with it.
When the waned moon began to wax once more, Raya and Benn chose to begin searching libraries and archives deeper in the city. They had found no more record of Axar’s presence on the shelves of the peasant scribes than they had gleaned from their bunkhouse keeper’s comments on the matter.
Today, Raya walked with Ben to a place called Food for Moths, a makeshift library that offered access to its books by trade, not a straight admission fee. Raya asked Benn about the name the first day they had gone to it, and he had smiled. “Books are made of parchment, which is the same thing as leather, right? Moths eat the protein out of them, same as they do leather or wool. This place is trying to be clever, but it’s a real problem.”
The books here looked just like the books in the Archive of Vagren, but now Raya knew that chaotic edge of some pages were the fault of the little insects that haunted the building.
After leaving the dense neighbourhood of Massed Alley, they followed Night Kra, one of the ancient avenues that cut through most of the city. They stopped a moment later at a shop stand where a man prepared rice for his customers. While Benn looked over the food, Raya asked, “Why do they call it Night Kraso?” It was the word for “road”.
“They don’t,” the shopkeeper said with a sly smile and a wink. “Maybe once they did, but it should be called a street not a road, now that Ith is a city so grand. Now it is just part of the name, Night Kra.”
“I see,” Raya said. Confused, she tried again: “Why do they call it Night?”
“The next one over is Day Street.” The merchant shrugged. “Who can say why our ancestors named these things?”
Raya shrugged and took a small wooden plate from Benn. They ate nearby, seated on the enormous stone steps that lined the sides of the valley portions of the street. The cobblestones themselves ran flat, despite the hills upon which Ith had been built. She used her flat utensil to put rice in her mouth; the soft sprinkle of cumin powder filled her senses with spice.
“All of you!” cried a man who came running down the street from the north. He waved his hands back that way. “The crowds are at the gates of King Rull’s palace! We’re demanding the food they’ve denied us!”
“How many are there?” asked one of the shop keepers, while the man who they had bought rice from packed up his wares quickly. A few of the other citizens started walking in the direction the man had pointed.
“A thousand, surely,” the man declared.
“Should we go?” Benn asked, dropping his utensil onto his plate.
Raya nodded. “I want to know what’s going on, but we’ll keep our distance,” she said.
It was not a long walk to the King Rull’s castle. It was built atop a hill, with square buildings of various sizes climbing the slope almost to its walls. The small crescent that accessed the palace’s grounds from Night Kra was wide enough for its own market, but all of that had been shoved aside as the crowd grew larger. Raya and Benn kept to the outside of the circle while most of the crowd pressed inward, closer to its gates.
Shouts echoed the air, voices of anger and despair. “My son is dying because of you!” a middle-aged woman shouted. Raya watched her hurl a tomato toward the castle wall.
A handful of men and women sat in armchairs up there, while one man in a long silk robe stood close to the edge and attempted to calm the crowd with soft words. “Citizens, King Rull protects and provides for you each day. He provides jobs for many of you.”
“Jobs, or slavery?” someone retorted.
One of the men sitting on the dais shook his head, eliciting a roar of outrage from the mob. That must have been King Rull himself. The man had a bald head and a short brown beard. His chest was bare; the long red robe he wore folded from each shoulder to his waist. A short sword with a golden hilt hung from his belt, even though he sat with crossed legs on a cushioned armchair.
“Open your granary!” a man in the front of the crowd shouted. “Feed us!”
King Rull flailed one hand dismissively and stood up. The crowd fell silent to hear his words. He was one of the eleven rulers of the city. “Go back to your homes,” Rull ordered. “It’s time for my lunch.”
The sigh of disappointment that went through the crowd made some snort in derision and others cry out in despair. Rull shook his head again and stepped toward the stairs from his wall down into his castle. A pitchfork caught the King in the shoulder—prongs protruded from his back and blood splattered the chair he had been seated upon and the slaves who had knelt to pick it up.
“By the gods,” Benn muttered. Raya and he took a few steps back from the crowd, closer to a storefront with wooden shutters chained closed.
Whoever had thrown the spear did not matter. The crowd was silent for a moment of shock, and then roared as they realized what had happened. Rull sank to his knees, hands clutching the rough wooden shaft that hung out of his shoulder. The others on the stage stood up and screeched—a few others, presumably magicians, raised their hands.
An arrow soared through the crowd and another one of the men on the stage fell, a man with long white hair. Raya’s ears dimmed the noise of the crowd, so the visual seemed to happen in silence.
“Let’s get out of here,” Raya said, her voice hoarse. Guards at the gate jabbed spears into the first row of the crowd. Benn nodded and the two friends quickly started down the street toward Night Kra.
A fresh screech went up for the crowd, and when Raya looked back, a cloud of mist had obscured the dais where the Mage King and one of his cohorts had been killed. The mist wafted downward, quickly, tendrils of grey and white that reached through the crowd. People began to collapse, some falling over onto one another, some trying to flee and climbing over those weaker or slower. Raya saw someone fall over a wagon stall, and lay there unmoving. She could not tell if they lived or died.
“Run,” Benn shouted, and their brisk retreat from the crescent became a dash. Amidst a hundred other panicked men and women, they surged down the cobblestone way and into the wide avenue of Night with the toxic cloud obscuring all of Rull’s castle from their sight.
Raya didn’t stop running until they had passed the market where they’d eaten lunch, though soon there were only a few others with them and no sign of the noxious fumes. A middle-aged woman looked at Raya and smiled faintly, but all of them were terrified, panting for breath, and angry. The other survivors diffused quickly, through alleyways, doorways, or down the street.
They waited an hour before returning to see what had happened. The crowd had started to recover—stoic guards stood on the walls of the castle, but there was no sign of the lords, kings, or violence that had been prevalent before. Instead, the guards had hastily nailed a plank of wood to the gate. In large, blue-painted letters, the Mage Kings had written, “You have taken lives that were not yours to take, but we will grant this mob mercy. Remember this tomorrow, for if you break the peace once more, you shall have war.” The men and women closest to the sign had been slain by the guards after King Rull had been struck, and they had been shown no mercy.
“We should go,” Benn said.
Raya nodded. As the majority of the crowd began to wake up, they retreated once more back to Freeman’s Bunkhouse to wind down from the disastrous trip. The civil unrest in Ith was boiling near the edge of the pan, ready to spill over with even more bloodshed than they had already witnessed. In the wake of it all, they tried to determine what role a man named Axar had in all of it, and what could be done to seek justice for the eruption of Mount Lukar.