Cinders of Magic

Chapter 7-1

Chapter 7

Holding, no matter how it was talked about by officers, was little better than a true prison; iron-barred cells stretched the length of the building and allowed a draft that never fully left. The building had been lovingly nicknamed, Bastard’s Hall. Men sat in the cells; most held two or three that were forced to share a single cot with rat chewed sheets. They were civilians for the most part or soldiers whose crime had been grievous enough to earn them a swift enough dismissal from the army to find themselves jailed. Most of those men had been where Elias waited at one time or another, a stone room that held minor infractors until their punishment was deemed dealt.

Five sat on the wooden benches that railed either side of the room, not including Elias, and talked in low tones as to not bother the man positioned at the door. Eddard had been a kind enough guard for Bastards Hall and cared little if the detainees carried on as long as they were respectful enough. The man even did a bit of trading with his charges, always sure to get better than he gave, and would sneak cigarettes in for three times the notes that they were worth. Once, he’d managed to find a cupful of whiskey to set through the bars of the door, not that the holding cells Elias found himself in were to be considered the same as jailing in an official capacity. The soldiers that lingered there knew better. Eddard’s replacement at night, Edgar, on the other hand, was a man of short temper that held no love for any man that had broken military code. Edgar never sat in the chair in the hall and stood by the door all night unless something else called him away from his position. As it was, the six men inside watched how loud they spoke, bothered more by having to deal with the man’s hollering and threatening than actual fear of what he might do.

Joh and Sid talked about what they were going to do tomorrow. That would be the last day of detainment for both men. The two, both old enough to be Elias’s father, had drunkenly started a brawl with some augmentees from Saike. The mercenaries, or as they preferred, Livo, had gotten the harsher part of the trade. There was little love for Saike in the kingdom, and even the mercenaries hired out of the east to help in the war were looked at with unveiled suspicion. The Saike had come with the reinforcements from the 8th army, and the commander there had jurisdiction over punishment handed out. From the way Joh told it, it would be a wonder if the mercenaries did not break their contracts and go home after the way things concluded. The two men, Sid and Joh, had earned a month of detainment and loss of rank. Neither seemed to care about it too much.

Eddien, a loose scrap of a man, curled in on himself most of the time, looking ready to dash for the door at the first sign of it opening. He hadn’t, and the times that the men were let out for daily exercise, Eddien was always last to leave. Something to do with a fire had landed the man in the dark stone room. Eddien refused to say any more than the barest details, and his quiet earned him little trust from the other men.

Forgo prodded the newest man to the cell to try and bring the fellow out of his shock. There was light enough in the room to see that the newest man’s uniform had been stripped bare of rank. From the bare patches at the man’s collar in the shape of a shield, Elias knew that whatever the man had done had been enough to lay a captain low. The man would be moving from the “Holding” to the more proper cells beyond once the proper paperwork was finished, Elias was sure.

There were few ways to earn a punishment like that, especially for an officer. Deserting would be the chief among them, followed far down by murdering a man. The new man did not look like a deserter to Elias, but then again, it wasn’t the kind of thing you could tell at a glance.

Movement past the door, close enough to be in the seldom-used hallway, cut the conversation from Joh and Sid. A voice, a woman’s voice, started in low tones to be matched in pauses with Edgar’s. A doorway, a small waiting area, and another heavy door past that obscured the words that were said between the two, but Edgar’s tone was indignant and held a twitch of anger under it. Anything that set the man to anger usually proved good for the detainees, and each man strained their ears to pick up even the barest word.

With a word, “b***h”, Edgar hauled open the door that lead out to the hallway and lumbered across the waiting area to begin working his keys at the second door. The woman that followed in behind him, presumably the b***h, looked as if the man’s insult was too far below her notice to register. Her hair was black as ink, even in the shadow of the hall that she stepped from, and it had been cut to the scalp in intricate patterns with the rest cut short so as not to spoil the effect. Elias could not see her eyes over the shadow on her face, but he knew they’d be an impossible purple like the color the sky sometimes took at sunset; all the Reyori had the same color eyes.

“Elias Rook!” Edgar roared as he flung open the iron bar door. Elias startled out of his inspection of the woman as the guard’s anger was turned on him suddenly. “You’re released!”

Elias jumped up from his seat on the bench, not bothering with pointless questions that would only earn him longer in the cell. He exchanged some words with Joh as he passed the old man and brushed by Edgar without giving the man much space to scramble out of the way. He’d been ready to say a quick farewell to Forgo on the way out but was brought up by the woman standing in the door’s entrance. She scrutinized him with a glare that he could only think to call imperious and sniffed to make her disdain known.

“So you’re the man,” she said. The hard vowels that echoed from deep in her throat gave her away as Reyori as much as the cut of her hair or eyes would.

“That would depend on which man you mean.” Elias found the chevrons on the woman’s sleeve and counted five there. A squad sergeant.

“Captain Eladrine sent me to find you when you weren’t with the rest of your squad.” The woman held up a paper towards Edgar. “I require a signature to official release--”

“You’ll get your signature at the front,” Edgar said, cutting her off. “None of my business anymore.”

The matter settled; the woman turned on her heel to start towards the hallway. Elias fell in behind her, not daring a word until the two were far from the cell and only following a bit of what was going on. The hallway was lit by old oil lanterns. The light changed from the red of flame to the bright white of glowing tungsten near the front of the building; the stone also became more well worked and decorated to please the eye. The front of the building looked more like the front entrance of some lord’s company than a prison. The iron doors at the entrance to the two hallways that lead off from the front stood as the only indication that it was anything else. A guard was stationed at each of the doors, and with a flash of the paper the Reyori woman bore, the man on the other side of the barred window slid the bolt clear to open the way.

A woman, wearing the uniform and patches of the 6th army, sat behind a simple desk in the middle of the entry room. Elias wondered if she had been picked for the position simply because of the inviting smile she effortlessly wore. The woman behind the desk was more than happy to give her signature and called a man over to retrieve Elias’s belongings. Everything except for his shirt and uniform pants had been seized when he had been brought in.

Elias hurried to slip his uniform jacket on and do up the buttons as the Reyori woman tossed the front doors aside, rushing into the cool night air. The first breeze of it, the first hint of non-enclosed air he had in eight days, sent goose-pimples across the skin of his forearms. The night air also carried with it the scent of pig s**t and sweat that always seemed present in Orailse. The lack of the stink had been the one good thing about confinement; that, and the company.

Half the lanterns that burned along the road just outside of the prison were dark, either intentionally left unlit to conserve channeling power or burned out. The few of the lights that burned red rather than white made Elias guess it was the latter. Carriages, pulled by horses more often than kirn rolled down the muddied street in a singular fashion, and just as often, groups of uniformed men opted to use the street rather than the side paths. The mens’ boots squelched with each step, mud trying to suck off the footwear, but the relieved soldiers in Orailse had long grown accustomed to the sucking of mud. Mud no longer even slowed the stride of such men.

“This city stinks,” the woman said. Elias noted that somehow her scowl had deepened. She turned to him. “You also stink. I’d have you clean yourself up some, but the captain wanted to see you right away.”

“And here I thought Captain Eladrine’s offer had just been talk.” Elias could tell even as he said it that the woman did not like the remark one bit.

“Captain Eladrine is an honorable man. He will stick to his word.”

“That’s good to know, Sergeant…”

“Mila Devault.” Mila looked at the five chevrons on Elias’s sleeve. “I suppose we will be contemporaries now.”

Elias looked to his sleeve, still unused to the extra chevron that peaked about above the others. “I suppose so,” he said. “I don’t have much of a squad left as it is. I imagine the captain will have my squad absorbed by another.”

“No. When your squad was taken into the 4th, the captain added fifty recruits to the six-seventy. Your second, Roan, I think is the man’s name, has been working them hard in the mud while you’ve been away.”

“Fifty…” Elias breathed. He was still getting used to the idea of being a squad sergeant, and now fifty unseasoned soldiers were being added to his responsibility.

“Yes, it took several days to get the proper papers for your release. Striking an officer usually lands harsher punishment than fifteen days in confinement.”

“Short of discharge or execution, there wasn’t much better punishment. The six-seventy is a penal squad. Was a penal squad at any rate. As long as you don’t kill anyone, the worst they’ll do is confine you for your days out of rotation before sending you back to the trenches with the rest when it is time.”

Squad Sergeant Devault looked ready to add something at that but clicked her mouth closed instead. The scowl on her face disappeared, and she contemplated Elias with a quirked brow. “We’re going this way,” she said, starting down the road to the north.