The Prophet and his General [2]

Lt. Kristoff watched the shadow on his wristdial shamble gradually toward a moment of dread realization, and he wondered that the small grey tendril didn't quiver. Rather, it progressed hairsbreadth by hairsbreath, despite the certainty of that which lay ahead. He prayed by Fate and all its spirits that he, too, possessed that stoicism-- without, if not within. Yes... if he had any real strength left within he would have been wrapped in his schracke,, he would have been mumbling dreams into the cocoon's fur interior and leaving his protection to the care of its treated leather skin.

Instead he was here, his men and the fire their metamatter camouflaged to his back and his face turned to the gelid night, aching beneath the ravages of its lightless expanse and the soft wind biting at his drawn features. He’d hoped that sting would distract him from all the horrors gnawing his gut. But then, so few of the wishes he'd uttered over the course of his short life had ever rallied the outcome he desired.

The only comfort to my name is that I don't have to carry that Zekkar-curst flashstick with me tomorrow. Its weight was as a memory, but one of a horror unformed, lurking in a fold of time's fabric he'd yet to brush. Imagination was anamnesis's fiendish twin. The lieutenant had never been one to let old aches and wounds keep him from the front, but he was certainly one to recoil from the hideous faceless entity that he could become.

He could have let that thought run away with him, could have chewed its rancid bones to keep the fatigue away, but just then the dour man's reflections were shattered by a rustle, a presence at his back.

Maulta rubbed his eyes blearily as he gazed down at the lieutenant. His robes were yet mussed by his sojourn in a schrake, and the frown conquering his features was yet vague on his lips: a disapproving sentiment that exhaustion would not let form-- not yet.

The lieutenant wanted to scowl, but found himself powerless to muster any expression at all. The arduous marks and shadows he'd spent alone with his sorry musings sapped him of the will to do anything but twist into the black of the taiga again. The lichlands were a rolling, diving, and leaping expanse which the trees rendered inscrutable by the varied heights of their silhouettes-- maps of the region were hazy at best as far as its contours went. It was, however, impossible for even the most inexperienced of travelers to miss the looming mount the largest Yggdraeil clan called home.

It was impossible to steer his eyes from that terminal.

"May I join you, Sir?"

The inquiry was whispered respectfully. Lieutenant Kristoff didn't answer it because he couldn't. He was still trying to escape the fears plaguing Lyle, the scrappy boy who had granted his life to Utter for fear that its slums would crush him beyond significance-- who was staring now, haunted, at a mountain and history that could devour him whole.

Then, that was precisely why he'd volunteered to dive in, wasn't it?

There was a pause. Then a hulking presence at his side, the noise of pine needles skittering and snow packing beneath the prophet's weighty figure. He rested there, at Lyle's side. Neither spoke. Not at first.

Words are illusion, thought the lieutenant. You've known that for a long time, haven't you? Your youth was spent under Grand Prophet Vakreigs' reign, after all. You saw what he was doing-- or, your dear old mother did. But you remember, just barely, the original image of the mechtrenche's folk hero, the Gaunekke. Those were the golden days of the ruodkeln, after all. Everybody and their uncle in the slums showing up to buy drinks for any man with a lute or a voice or one of those outrageous all-black getups made to show off how pale they were, to show they were proud of defying the upper caste. A black suit and a head for petty crime, a few handouts to the community... those were enough to earn you a reputation as a Gaunekke. Oh, class tensions were all kinds of high, then.

Ahh, and clever Vakreig... he played patron to those infamous little musicians, started broadcasting their tunes far and wide, and making sure it was only their music as was put out there. All they had to do was sing of their hero the Gaunekke. Sing of him all spit and shined and polished, redeemed by hard work and loyalty to his great state. Oh, but that Grand Prophet was a paranoid, ruthless old bastard. And yet, who could say we weren't better off after his reign? By a simple lie he destroyed the moral of the mechtrensche, more surely than flashsticks or munitions ever could-- but in the end did he not grant the worker a place of legitimacy amidst the southern, cultured elite? 'Father of the Poor', some still call him. Letting the workman's guilds form again, for all that he tended to blacklist most other organizations; formalizing education... Did he not unify our divers' cultures into something resembling a nation, with all the benefits accompanying it?

Leaving aside the worst of the wrongs he committed, that greater liberty... was it worth the annihilation of an entire way of life?

If I didn't believe that to be true, would I be here at all?

"Those look to be some heavy thoughts you're nursing," Maulta murmured, and the closeness of that breath exhumed was enough to jolt the lieutenant from his reminiscence. He flashed the Prophet a withering look. It produced little effect save a shameless, tiny smile offered as comfort.

Kristoff sighed in aggravation. "I'm suspicious of your kind, Prophet."

"Why?"

"They don't exist."

The Prophet turned a whiskered grimace and simple brown eyes to regard his superior.

"Permission to speak freely, Sir?" he asked.

"I pray that you do." The lieutenant was already drifting back off, back into the hazy realm of his contemplations, and the harshness of Maulta's voice startled him.

"If the way you let your men treat you is of any indication, then I can’t believe you’d know a shred of decency if it cracked you in the face."

Lyle blinked. Then turned his face away. It did, inexplicably, pain him-- the memory of how they had spoken to the Prophet of him the day before, without even the bile of necessity, only a dismissal of their leader, only hope for a new one. Nevertheless, he gave a half shrug. "Their prejudices are no concern of mine. They do the work; that's all that matters to me."

The Prophet's brow tucked itself into a thick wedge that shadowed his features. "And the next mechtrenschen to have to deal with them?"

"Hopefully he'll be wise enough to ignore it and do what needs doing as well," the lieutenant reprimanded.

Maulta subsided, and to his surprise Lyle felt a pain of regret, quickly as he suppressed it. If not dishonest, the man at his side was fael-touched. This was a khacking army. It had no time for questions of rights or formalities; its sole virtue was the freedom to be able to think for itself and the discipline necessary to bend that faculty to the execution of duty. And yet...

"That, I think, is why it upset me," spoke the Prophet, turning that broad and winsome face of his to the stars, the moons. Lyle hadn't noticed they were there, and upon the realization felt at once safer and more vulnerable as Maulta continued: "This is no easy task that you face on the morrow. Not even our best linguists have a solid grasp of the Yggdraeil's tongue. And as I understood it, you were trained as a tactician, not a spy."

"You don't think I've been doing a good enough job scaring myself to pox without your help, prophet?" The lieutenant grunted irritably.

"I think you're staying awake tonight so you'll be too weary to lock up with fear tomorrow."

Perceptive. Lt. Kristoff growled. "I didn't choose this as a suicide mission, if that's what you're thinking," he said, in part to reassure himself. The last thing he needed was for his self-loathing to prove more than the tiny nubbin he could feel rubbing at the base of his skull. "As Craut so elegantly pointed out yesterday, all I have to do is put in black eyefilms and I'm the picture of a native. Furthermore, I already have a plan to get around the language issue." I never did have a head for that sort of thing, anyway. Let alone those clever liches' tongue-- the way you're supposed to speak changes as you get older-- or, closer to death, as they would put it.

Maulta's expression didn't alter from its concerned bent, and Lyle was relieved that the Prophet’s eyes were yet cast to Aagyre-- to his martyr Rue, perhaps. Unlike his peers Maulta didn't have that annoying habit of fiddling with the starburst, the holy symbol pinned to every Utterian soldier's collar.

"...permission to ask a hard question, Sir?"

Lyle scowled. "Stop asking my permission for everything. If you've a mind enough to challenge me then I'd rather you do what you see as best."

Maulta met his eyes and raised a brow. "My question aside, I'm surprised you think that way. You seem… more meticulous than that. More controlled."

The lieutenant crossed his arms over his chest, tucked his freezing hands back under his armpits as he huffed a plume of vapor into the frigid air. "Dogs can't fight if they're on a tight leash, no matter how well trained."

"Who said that?"

"Zekkar's blacks if I know originally. My mother told it to me when I told her I was off to become an officer."

The Prophet's features were more dazzling when he grinned like a fool. Shifting uncomfortably, the lieutenant readopted his glaring policy and issued it full force upon the bear of a man.

"Well? Your question?"

That grin eased gradually from the Prophet's lips as he twisted to stare at the lieutenant. His eyes were searching, and Lyle was very aware, very suddenly, of the heavy bags under his own eyes, the smallness of his frame and the stress lines marring every crag of a mask that simply didn't align with his supposed youth. For a moment, Maulta was quiet in his scrutiny. The lieutenant was just about to berate him, anything to turn that heavy gaze away. But then the question fell, a block of cinder that shattered on impact, turning the world all to a sooty, spinning, and particulate realm that blinded.

"Why did you agree to this, Sir?"

The lieutenant's jaw tightened. He realized that it had been this the prophet was alluding to when he remarked that he'd been trained as a tactician, and a skilled one. Swallowing, he spoke tightly:

"Short of blowing the Yggdraeil out of their mountain, women and children and all-- which would be easy-- we don't know how to get at them without being picked off ourselves. They have a fair number of blasters and other munitions that they've managed to steal and stockpile, lining all the holes in their dungeon. A tactician is needed inside if we're to form any sort of coherent strategy."

"...that's the official story, anyway," Maulta said, not unkindly.

"It's the story entire, damn it." The lieutenant turned roughly back to the dark. Another, blessed pause ensued. But then the Prophet's hand landed, heavy, on his shoulder and he glanced up.

"In that case," prodded the towering man. "Wouldn't it be better to say that this tactician needs to see inside?"

Lyle's eyes widened, and he smacked the palm on his collarbone away as though it burnt, pupils darting over Maulta's form in a desperate, wild scrabble to search out his motive. Then, trying to ease the panic that had quickened his breath with an accusation, the lieutenant shot:

"What's your real rank, Prophet?"

Maulta winced sheepishly. "You're sharp... much higher than yours, I have to admit."

"Khacking pox," Lt. Kristoff swore.

The Prophet's smile was a thing rimmed with caution, then, a sort of melancholy. "I was to judge whether you were fit for this mission. So you can see how it's important that you answer why you want to head down there."

The lieutenants eyes were keen flint digging into the boots he was staring down at, threatening to spark on his galvanized form. Maulta was patient, and that was for the best, because it took several marks for Lyle to sort himself out, to grate between his teeth, his gaze lancing up:

"Why do you fight in this war, Prophet?"

The prophet blinked, and then chuckled softly. Lyle found it disorienting, the fact Maulta’s rank hadn't altered his bear-like mannerisms in the slightest. Either way, when the prophet answered it was without a trace of doubt or disillusionment, without a hint of the bitterness a leader of his rank should, by all rights, possess.

"It's as you say. Prophets who go to war lead the state later. And I intend to rid ours of the corruption and evils plaguing it as thoroughly as I can."

Lyle was incredulous. "That's just simple-minded!"

"How so?"

"Because--!" the lieutenant bristled. "It's not that clear-cut or straightforward! Furthermore, you can't justify participating in a war for the sake of the gains later and expect that those later gains will be--!" He bit the criticism off, but it protested violently, scalded his tongue. He could feel it, that old anger, the indignity boiling his blood even as it drained from his face with the stress of containment.

Maulta's head cocked to the side, as though he'd found something unexpected. Thoughts were dancing behind those wide, clear eyes of his, and the words that matched them were slow, deliberate on his lips.

"So you go into the mountain searching for justification?"

That struck too close to the lieutenant's heart. "I already have my justification," he hissed. "If it can be called that."

"What, then?"

Lyle bit his lip, felt the skin over it threatening to rupture, to break beneath the hardness of his tooth. When his answer came, it gushed in a paroxysm of frustration. "I-- The Yggdraeil are a hard people. The things they do to women, and to children—their actions comparable to our past cruelties, or even worse. It’s true that there is no such thing as a 'right' in culture, but I do believe there to be a 'wrong.' Even if it is hypocritical, that an imperfect state like ours should march in searching for fiscal gain and alliance and call it a moral quest, if it means that the lichlands will find a better way for their people-- one where they aren't killed or tortured-- then, even if it makes a bastard of me, I--."

He swallowed. "I believe that it should absolutely be done."

Maulta's lips had parted with the fall of his jaw beneath that impromptu treatise, and Lyle clicked his tongue, thrust his face into the cloak of darkness once more, away from the crimson and yellow fire licking at his bright eyes.

"I go into the mountain," his voice trebled out in conclusion, "To affirm that belief. And to see the enormity of the transgression I will have to commit to fight for it."

The silence then was absolute. Even the sundry, jaded creatures of the taiga seemed to still, as though Uegyre, in that moment, really did revolve around man and his futile struggles.

Then Lyle felt a hand grasp his own. He yelped, trying to jerk away until he realized, with shock, that the prophet was shaking it. Rattled, he lifted his raw eyes to the bear-like man's visage.

Maulta's expression was grim, but there was about him an air of a calm shaken by a surge of something unexpected, something like hope but different, more intimate.

"You can go, then," he said, quietly. "On one condition, lieutenant."

"W--what?" the smaller man stammered, heart pounding.

"Let me keep your vigil with you."

There was no arguing with that.