The Thorian Sagas. 2. Insurrection.

Monique MacBeath walked the ramparts to her city that night, needing to understand these new things she was suddenly aware of.

Their lives had changed almost imperceptibly over the last year, since Stoker had been coming to them, and then had suffered major disruptions in just the last week after Stoker had gone. Fenn would never be the same without him. He had become an essential part of their lives.

The violent visions that had unexpectedly flooded over them in just the last two days had changed their lives even more.

It was as though curtains, shielding them from the real world out there, had been pulled away. They were no longer constrained or confined to what they were familiar with. The wall around their city no longer existed. They could see; had seen the outside world, thanks to these tributes and what had happened to them in Saltash and was about to happen to them once they left Fenn.

When morning came, she would be the one that would send the tributes out of the city into the wasteland. It was a task she had never had to take on before, or ever expected to. She had heard the rumors; knew—thought she knew—what would happen to those tributes after they left the city.

She had been wrong. They had all been wrong. Their various beliefs seem to have been born of ignorance and fear, rather than of them being deliberately misled; but they’d still been wrong.

The wasteland was no longer unknown, or such a feared and unwelcoming place to her as it once had been. Stoker had educated them on that, letting them see the explosion of life that came, following the rains, or pointing out the nature of the life that lurked in the darkness, waiting for its next meal. It had been an education, and it was ongoing.

That inhospitable place was now known to be not so inhospitable, nor was it to be feared. The tales that she’d heard about it being unwelcoming or dangerous, were no longer so readily believed, though it could be both unwelcome and dangerous to those who did not understand it or were not prepared.

As far as the tributes were concerned; rather than being afraid, as all tributes before them had been, these young women, waiting in the guardhouse below, couldn’t wait to get out into it, for what they knew awaited them out there.

Monique felt, and was able to experience their impatience and excitement, and now knew for herself why they were that way. Stoker had trained them well.

Something else had drawn her onto the walls to walk there; every sense coming alive as she sniffed the cooling night air, listening to the sounds from just beneath the walls, trying to interpret them. Succeeding. Sounds of survival; of life, and of avoiding death.

She had the feeling of being watched by many eyes. It no longer concerned her.

The city walls sloped outward down to the ground where the walls were at least ten feet wide. The ancient builders had known what they were doing, but memory of them had been lost over the generations. The surface of the outer wall was glass-smooth, with nothing to hold onto between the close-fitting blocks; thanks to the builders. No animal could find a toehold there to climb up to the city, so she had no fears about that, but she was armed anyway.

A year ago, she would not willingly have come up here in the dark with its secrets and imagined horrors ready to swoop out of the night, like some gigantic bat, and pluck her off the wall.

Monsters existed only in the untutored mind. Stoker had swept their fears aside for them and taught them what all warriors needed to know; that the only things they needed to fear were always in their own minds.

Had it been light enough, she might even have been able to see those other life forms from the desert that huddled next to the wall of an evening for its warmth. Their sounds carried clearly up to her as long as she was quiet herself.

If her sandals made any sound, then those other noises went suddenly quiet.

She could hear rustling from far beneath her to suggest that ‘life,’ was settling there, as usual, to survive the night, but she could see nothing. She had seen the bats leave the city that evening and then heard them return soon after; they were still returning, so she knew it was going to be a cold night, just as they had known.

An additional tribute; a second from Fenn, had been added to the one they’d expected to send out to make up the numbers. There were nine now, but ten had to go out of the city, so a third tribute from Fenn was still needed. That third tribute, already identified by the council, was proving difficult to find. She could not know what awaited her. She might not even be found before morning light, but Councillor Simpson had known whom she would choose to be that tenth tribute.

There were always old scores to settle. It was just a matter of finding that one person, blissfully unaware of what awaited her. However, that decision about the tenth tribute, was council business to make, and it had nothing to do with Monique.

Monique had, for a moment, glimpsed a mischievous thought in councillor Simpson’s mind and in her eyes. It was something to do directly with the business of the city, and with the absent councillor Bradshaw, whom no one liked.

Anything that involved Bradshaw was usually unpleasant, or could soon be made that way if you went against her, or were thought to have done so.

Simpson was going to go against her. It would be a dangerous thing to do.

The less Monique knew of such petty infighting, the better.

The internal bickering and jockeying for position and power in the ranks of the councillors was well known to those who were close to the city administrators, and who had to pick up the pieces afterward or mend the breaks.

If the people knew of the devious plotting, the minor intrigues, the extra comforts they enjoyed, or how they maneuvered and manipulated to keep others out of positions of influence and authority, there would indeed be an insurrection.

Simpson should get on with finding whomever she had chosen, and before Bradshaw got back and found out what she was doing.

Nine Tributes waited below. They needed that tenth, to be compliant with the treaty. They had never fallen short before and would not do so now.

From what Monique now knew; learned over just the last few hours and in the last day, she herself would have volunteered to be that tenth tribute, but that was something she needed to think about. She still had relatives and a close younger sister in the city, so it was not a decision that could be taken lightly. Besides, Simpson would never allow that. Warriors were not allowed to be tributes, and why would anyone volunteer? No one ever volunteered to meet that assumed fate.

Unlike any of the other tributes Monique had briefly glimpsed over the years when Stoker had brought them into the city before they were whisked away by Bradshaw, these tributes were different.

For the first time, they were no longer afraid of that ‘unknown’ that awaited them. This time they knew what awaited them beyond the city wall, and so too did Monique and her fellow guards. It was not a fate any of them seemed to fear, but to welcome. It was certainly not what they’d been led to believe awaited them, and it puzzled Monique that no one seemed to have known of this before.

It was another myth being laid to rest, just as with her own views of Thorians, even though she did not fully understand just how her thinking had changed or how far, just yet. It had crept up on her so gradually over the last year that Stoker had been coming to them, that it had never been questioned.

Until now.

She was not even sure at what exact moment she had learned that Stoker was a Thorian himself. He’d said nothing, though he’d dropped enough clues by what he’d admitted to, and the way he’d spoken about that taboo subject without any fear.

There were many things that had not been as she had been led to believe. Especially about Thorians. Everything she had been taught, or thought she had known about them and so many other things, had been wrong.

Now, she questioned everything.

There was a faint glow, the last of the day’s sunshine, beginning to fade in the western sky. The birds had long-since returned back to the shelter of the city to huddle on branches and in cornices against the cold. She could hear their last chattering of the day beginning to fade with the sun.

When she turned her back on that faintly lingering sunset, the stars were even then so clear, so bright. No hint of a cloud. It would indeed be a viciously cold night with the air so dry, but it would also become an equally hot day, once the sun rose again in the morning, making the black-topped wall she was walking now, too hot to walk upon, even in her sandals.

She knew that she was being ‘pulled’ in some way, to walk along that wall. She felt it but did not understand it. It was a compulsion that had been impossible to resist.

Her necklace; Stoker’s necklace, presented to her just hours before, was doing that for her, but she did not fight that feeling. She had given in to it. She welcomed this even more-open window upon the outside world.

She sensed the many beings and voices out there calling to her, hundreds of them, man and animal alike, just as she was calling out to them but without deliberately doing so. They were just vague noises, with little that made any sense. She did not know the language of most of what she heard.

There was nothing to be afraid of where she was, and she was curious about such sensations, always needing to know more; much as a curious child will keep turning the pages to see the ever more magical creatures that leapt from the page to entertain her.

Long gone, was that fear of being alone in such an exposed place, facing the threatening ‘unknowns’, just beyond the wall. Stoker had done that for them all, giving them confidence in themselves for what they could achieve, and breeding an adventurous spirit of self confidence in them.

The only thing they had to fear was their own lack of knowledge of what lay out there. They had already begun to deal with that by breaking the rules of the city.

Each night, they had ventured farther beyond the city wall, though only under cover of darkness and without anyone knowing what they were doing. They’d gone out in groups of five, and for no more than an hour each time, so that they would not be missed.

Others would assume that they were patrolling the wall, or the city; no one would ever dare leave the city during the day, never mind at night! It would be utter madness to do so.