Any resemblance to real persons or events is entirely coincidental.
It was two days since Marius had killed the Hierophant, and he fully expected that every heartbeat would be his last. But each beat was a flicker of luck refusing to die out (hope had burned away long ago), and Marius had always been a particularly lucky young man.
If he wasn’t, there was no way he could have been successful with the killing in the first place. Marius should have been stopped at the heavily guarded gates of the inner city, if not the still more-than-reasonably guarded outer walls of the capital itself. The men who screened the bags and belongings of the people passing through were either too busy or too indifferent to notice what the young man had in his satchel.
Marius had entered the capital with only a vague excuse that he was there to visit family. Those he met either believed the story, or pretended to without bothering to argue. He still wore his old student robes, and was the right age to still appear a pupil of the Great University. And those odd wooden things in his bag? Well, it was known that His Majesty (the New and Forever King, God Praise His Name) had charged the loyal students at the University to create new weapons for him, weapons that would be used against the growing number of Enemies that seemed to pop up every day. It’s a new model ballista, you see, capable of firing faster and farther Marius had planned to answer if questioned. I’ll ask the professor leading the project if you can come witness the tests sometime.
If the New King had bothered to employ guards with minds, rather than blind loyalty, perhaps they might have recognized the components of a hand crossbow, not unlike the ones they themselves carried.
After Marius had cleared the gates and made his way towards the white marble square at the heart of the city, one suspicious University official had stopped him and asked for identification. There too, the man should have recognized that the papers Marius carried—the ones claiming he was a student of a different name, of different political loyalties—were forged. The official had once taught both Marius and his brother Lucius in the days of the Old King, and he had liked neither of them. Yet he didn’t seem to recognize his former student’s blank gray eyes or stubbly cheeks, and after a few moments he had shoved the papers back into the assassin’s grasp with only some annoyed grumbling.
Then the assassin went to the square, blending in with thousands of others. Rich Men who cheered every mad decision the New King made, because those decisions would surely make them richer. And Cowardly Men, who might have kept their opposition to the New King in their mouths out of fear for their own lives. And Cynical Men, who hated everything in the world and cheered the Kingdom’s accelerating slip into destruction.
Perhaps there were a few good-hearted believers in the crowd as well, making their way towards the Great Temple to pray for the peace and safety that seemed to wither a little more each day. But the Temples were as corrupt as the Kingdom now. The Hierophant had always been a greedy, unchaste man, but under the Old King he had been discouraged from outwardly abusing the people of the Kingdom. But the Old King had died, and now the New King reigned. And it was whispered that it was the Hierophant who put His Majesty on the great golden throne in the palace, either through prayers, Magic, or treachery. It was unknown which.
What was known was that such holy Temples were the only places where Good Magic could heal the sick and injured. The old people could remember when such Magic was paid for with kindly prayers from the populace, or through good service to the needy. Now the Hierophant demanded tithes for healing, and it seemed ever more gold was needed to work miracles. Those in desperate straits who had no gold could instead offer their children, supposedly in service of the many Priests under the Hierophant. In the old days such children would bring food to the poor, or learn the arts of healing themselves. Now dark things were whispered about the fates of those children, and once taken, few were ever seen again.
Marius’ younger sister had been one such tribute. Their father had been a rich man once, a shipbuilder. But there had been an accident that crippled the old man, and a once vast fortune was fed like kindling into the coffers of the Great Temple. Marius and his brother Lucius had been forced to leave their places at the University and become laborers, while their sister tended to the father who never got better. The old shipbuilder had pleaded to his children to let him die, to not throw their futures away for his sake, but so great was their love for him that when the money ran out, the sister gave herself to the Hierophant and his Priests, and sent no further word.
But Marius had met an old prostitute in one of the dingy bars of the capital. She too had once served the Hierophant, until she grew too old and ugly to be of use to him anymore. The woman told Marius of the horrifying things that happened not only in the Temples, but in the very Palace itself. Sin was eating away at the heart and soul of the Kingdom, and unless it was cut out, all would be infected.
The old shipbuilder was dead now, and the family’s little hovel sold for a few jingling coins that had been split between Marius and Lucius: all that remained of the once-happy family. They made their plans together in dingy taverns, and then embraced each other a final time before going their separate ways, their hearts steeled with determination.
On the Great Feast Day, Marius moved like a ghost through the crowd of pilgrims in the white marble square. The splendidly-dressed men and black-robed students around him had their heads bowed as they approached the Hierophant to receive his benediction. The old man in his golden robes and jeweled mitre had a melting smile and sweat-dampened hands as he laid them on his followers’ brows, and when he looked on the handsome face of young Marius, he saw nothing amiss.
Then a crossbow bolt fired directly into his eye, the tip burying itself in the old sinner’s brain.
A whirl of colors and chaos followed. Marius was not the only student in attendance, and many other young men were snatched by their black robes and accused of the murder. These young men didn’t know the inner city as well as the assassin. Most of the students of Marius’ age had been expelled when they refused to make oaths of loyalty to the New King, and many of those who replaced them hadn’t learned the secret alleys and pathways where the assassin now fled.
He took solace in the house of a young lady who had once been a fellow student, when women were allowed in the University. Under the New King’s edicts, she had been expelled and given to a husband twice her age, who was confined upstairs with a sudden mysterious illness. In the woman’s house, Marius burned his robe and forged papers, and changed into servant clothes. The crossbow was disassembled, the wooden parts tossed in the fireplace while the metal bits were either buried or hammered into unrecognizable shapes. Guards came to the house to ask questions, but the young lady pled ignorance and told them to come back when her husband was well, and they didn’t investigate further.
In the morning, Marius ventured to the outer city in his servant clothes with pretend orders to visit the market. Wanted posters were plastered on every building, with a handsome reward promised in exchange for the assassin or even word of him, but with dirt on his face and a dull look in his eyes, the serving boy didn’t much resemble the handsome student who had killed the Hierophant. The gate guards didn’t stop him, especially not the one who looked scoffingly at the black flowers being heaped at the door of the Great Temple. Marius thought he looked familiar, another young man who had perhaps been at the University with him. If the guard was who Marius suspected, he had given two sisters to the Temple.
Many people saw Marius’ face in the market that day. Some he were sure recognized him. When his family had money they had lived in the outer city, in a neat but unostentatious little house now turned into a maze of decaying flats. Many of the proprietors at the stalls he passed surely knew his face. But no one troubled him the entire day. And at night, when he hid into his least favorite tavern, whispers flitted about, but not toward him.
I’m glad the old fucker is dead!
Johan gave the Temple three daughters, and got nothing for them but more debt.
Saul saw tiny coffins being carried out of the Temple to the potter’s field…
Why should my wife have died of an infection for want of money, while the rich get to buy our children for excess of it?
Now if someone will just take out the fat bastard in the palace…
Perhaps no one believed the guards were listening. Or perhaps the tavern was full of such despair that no one cared. Let the New King kill them all. It would be the only way out of hell flourishing around them, and growing worse each day.
But no guards came that night. Marius slipped a few coins to the barman, who let him sleep in the cellar. He left early in the morning, at the changing of the guards. He wasn’t sure if he would be able to escape the capital city proper, and even if he did, there was no home or brother waiting for him anymore. He was young and strong though, and knew more than a little about ships. He might sail to freer lands across the ocean, then send word for Lucius to join him once things were safe. If they could ever be safe again.
First, there was one more gate to clear.
Not the city gates. Since the assassination no one was allowed to leave without express written permission from the King’s Magistrate himself. Marius might have tried to forge such a document, but instead he slipped into the dingiest part of the city, where the reek of death and shit and sorrow could be smelled from blocks away. There was an old dry well there, where the poor would throw whatever refuse they didn’t dare leave in the streets. Marius had a rope in his hands and a scented scarf tied over his face, and descended into the foulness.
He landed on something dead; he wasn’t sure what. Scrambling over the heap of flesh and excrement, he felt his way along the slick stone walls until he felt a gap in the wall that connected with the sewers. Marius didn’t dare light a lantern, knowing what he did about explosive gases, and instead let his eyes adjust to the darkness, following towards what seemed more gray than black, and occasionally removing his scarf to try and get a whiff of fresh air.
Marius didn’t know how long he was in the sewers. It may have been a few hours, or a few days. Several times he sat down on damp stones to rest, and sometimes he thought he slept. He heard voices echoing through the tunnels, but couldn’t say if they were spoken by real people or phantoms in his mind. But eventually he did see real light, and smell air that had whiffs of grass and the sea in it. The tunnel opened onto an isolated, muddy beach a few miles outside the city, and though he smelled worse than anything imaginable, Marius was free in the noon light.
He decided to swim in the ocean a bit, to wash some of the stink and foulness off. There was a current that wanted to drag his body farther along the coast, and Marius let himself drift in it. When he did come ashore, he could claim to be shipwrecked, all his papers and belongings lost to the sea. When he no longer recognized the shore, but saw a building perched on a bluff ahead, he made his way onto solid ground and dragged himself towards it.
The place was a scenic little inn, empty at the early hour, and manned only by a young girl with wide eyes, clearly shocked at his bedraggled appearance. Marius told her his fictional shipwreck story, then laid a gold coin on the counter and asked for a hot meal and change of clothes. The girl was uncertain, but took the coin and disappeared into a room at the back of the tavern. There was a commotion from back there shortly after, but then came a smiling woman with fresh clothes in hand, and the scent of cooking herbs about her.
The woman instructed Marius to go and change in a free room upstairs, and her daughter would have dinner ready soon. When Marius came back down, a few more men had gathered around the tables and were muttering to each other.
Killed in his bed.
Capital’s in chaos, they say.
Wonder if it was the same one that killed the Hierophant.
Marius turned to look out first at the sea, then at the white road that wound over the bluffs and back towards where he believed the capital lay. A warm, strange smile crossed his face even before the woman placed a mug of ale and a bowl of stew in front of him.
The smile even lasted when the royal guards entered the inn, the wide-eyed girl pointing Marius out directly while she gripped a wanted poster in her other hand.
“That’s him! That’s the one who came out of the ocean!”
“I’m sorry lad,” the girl’s mother apologized as the guards laid their heavy hands on him. “But my man’s sick you see, and we need the money for the Temple…”
It didn’t matter. Marius thought back to the gossip he heard in the tavern, the same gossip the guards were whispering to each other now. The New King was dead, murdered in his bed.
Well done, Lucius was all Marius could think. Perhaps his brother would have a luckier escape than he had. Or perhaps Marius would claim to have killed the New King in addition to the Hierophant, and buy his brother’s freedom with more lies.
It seemed a fair price, for the excision of sin.