The Ghost's Crusade

Chapter V: Drystan

More than glad to leave the keep behind, Drystan stuck to the back alleys on his way to the Fiddler's Pipe, perhaps a ten minute walk from where he parted company with the pompous city leader. The longer route gave him time to mull over what the Ovan had related to him. Of course it had all been phrased in gilded bullshit, but he could glean what he needed from the fancy words given enough time to think it over. And perhaps a tome of reference for archaic verbs and adjectives for translation purposes.

It had taken forty-five minutes to get the Ovan to spit out all of the pertinent information. Wading through his overly thought-out wording and long contemplative pauses filled with drawn-out utterances of the word “well” had been verbal torture. Drystan had no patience for people that tried to make things sound better than they were by using big words to prove they had a good handle on the situation when all they really had was a large dictionary and ample time to waste studying it. It evolved into an exercise of divine restraint to maintain his composure in the man's presence. He would have been fine with a five-minute summary detailing where, when, and how many bodies they had already found throughout the city in the past month.

Naturally, the Ovan did not have that information. He only seemed content to detail how he would be deploying his men to deal with the threat only after reinforcements arrived. It became glaringly apparent to Drystan halfway into the disguised interrogation that the man was content to rest on his laurels and wait for outside aid from the city-state to the east, Wessinberg.

He had been in Wessinberg several months ago. They were still upset fifty years later over failing to conquer Baedorn during the One Summer's War. Though they had a well-maintained and virtually impregnable veneer of friendship, most of the nobility would like nothing more than to seize Baedorn and brow-beat the scions of House Jadri for their father's questionable victory over Wessinberg's champion decades ago. It was a dangerous gambit for the Ovan to take, inviting their armed troops into his city when his own people were miserable and afraid of walking out of their own homes at night.

It didn't take a great deal of experience in warfare to see what was coming. Unfortunately, as an Inferi, he could not involve himself in such things unless it was by the order of his commander. And his commander had no intention of letting herself or her Inferi subordinates become involved in petty wars that had no bearing on the actual edicts of Antenox. Things were tenuous enough as it stood in the Oribian without having their order perceived as willing to take sides in the feudal politics of the city-states. Their widely known neutrality was a both a boon and a burden, allowing them to move freely among even warring nations but also keeping them from acting upon things they might consider wrong unless it was also wrong according to the laws of the nations they were traveling through at the time.

Bereft of useful information, he had excused himself from the office of the Ovan and headed straight to the seneschal with what was left of his by then questionable sanity. The tired but highly organized and informed man had given him answers to almost all his questions in under five minutes without a single frivolous word. He probably was too exhausted to put as much thought into his sentences as the Ovan had, but nonetheless he was forced to revise his opinion of seneschals in general. Marion Luke was a very competent administrator and he didn't miss much at all. It was a pity he wasn't the one in charge, but the impression he received was that Luke wanted absolutely nothing to do with the Ovan's seat and was only there out of loyalty to the previous Ovan, who had been a charismatic leader from what Drystan was able to glean. Though politics had kept him from saying it outright it was fairly obvious that the seneschal believed the current man in charge was a moron unworthy of his inheritance, too entitled and proud to listen to the counsel of those who were the wiser.

The Inferi paused and let a half-empty cart trundle by before he crossed the street into the next shadowy alley. Even the mule team pulling it looked depressed, their noses practically dragging along the cobblestones as they plodded along in morose apathy. The driver was bedraggled and just as exhausted-looking as the seneschal. Now that he took notice, everything was quieter than it should have been, and the mule's shoes echoed quite loudly off the walls of the white-stuccoed buildings lining the empty street. There were no children running about shouting and playing; there were no old wives standing near the fountains gossiping about what they had heard from the widows down the street; there were no men complaining about their wives who were gossiping instead of doing wifely duties. Everyone was inside, and they only seemed to come out out of sheer necessity to get somewhere else and go back indoors.