The Blood of Alchemy

Chapter 2: The City of Oros

The musk of summer was hot and spicy in the air. The scent of supper was lingering through the yards and rising up the high towers, filling the nostrils of the castle residents with a mouth watering aroma of garlic crusted mutton from the kitchens, as King Edmond II peered down from a stone perch onto the training grounds, where high-born children ran through the yards, frolicking about with their wooden soaking wands, a toy which one would fill with water, and then press down a small button that released an inner-plate on a spring, forcing all the water out in a stream from the tip. The toy was supposed to be like a magicians wand, but they emptied much too fast, and then the children were onto other things, like playing in the fountains or the irrigation streams that ran from a nearby spring and supplied fresh water to the entire city.

From where Edmond stood he could follow the streams from the castle to the grand gates, and then far out past them into the fields of orchards and the farms that bordered the city for miles.

He was forty three, with short gingerly hair that sat beneath a crown of thin white gold, enamelled with sapphires, rubies, and decorated with intricate floral patterns of brilliant yellow. Everything was gold. His black eyes even glimmered with a shine of the metal, reflecting everything around him. He had a square jaw, lined with a long beard of red, dyed with streaks of flaxen, and wore a coat of bullion, edged and snowy white furs from the far north.

He fumbled a golden scorpion through his fingers, as he did his best to imagine the purple sky his father had told him about. He had described it as the reverse of lightning. It had been sighted by vicars for miles, in every city where a drachyn stood.

Behind him the castle stood massive, the biggest, most luxurious castle in all of the lands, with seven tall towers. Edmond had it built during the repairing of the city after the alchemist wars, though he never lifted a finger in the labour. The walls were built in a hexagon shape, fifteen feet thick at every corner. Six men could walk shoulder to shoulder in full armour on the walls. The portcullis comfortably held two dozen archers and a large catapult, readied with boulders at its side, and at each of the six points was one of the hundred foot tower of marbled stone and hard purple amethyst. In the centre was the seventh tower, standing two-hundred feet high, on which the balcony Edmond stood peeked out of the side. If only you could see the city now, father.

A child threw a wand into the streams, and Edmond's eyes followed as it floated down the lines, drifting through one of the square holes of the water gate and away from the castle keep.

His eyes followed as the current took it past the houses of the wealthiest parts of the city, and past the houses of the tax collectors, priests, and lawmen, the highborn families, and the merchants, and the traders who controlled the Grand Oroshi Bay Market. It floated by the smaller lines the led off to water luscious gardens, decorated with intricately carved fountains of smooth stone, and blooming with bright floral pathways and trees covered in the fruits of summer - plums, peaches, nectarines and cherries. Only a week earlier he had taken the fingers of a young lad who decided he would steal some a bag full of plums. His knights had caught the thief literally red handed, stained with plum juice.

The toy got harder to spot as they ran into the main of the city, where he scanned the faces of less luxurious stone fountains, made mostly in the shape of God, and people were merely specks in the distance. Maybe that's why they call them smallfolk. The population of Oros was one of the largest in the land, a hundred thousand in the city alone, and that was not counting the castles, the farmers, or the flock of newcomers that made their way to the city every year. There were easily a dozen good smiths, and for every one of them two cheap ones, and two dozen artists. There were no shortage of inns and churches, and . There were bakeries and restaurants, and no shortage of pubs and brothels, for the lonesome wanderer.