Chapter 27: Being too nosy

Work the next day was monotonous. After explaining to Aura who Cat was, leaving out the part about him being a manipulator, Kira had gone about the palace like he normally would, ending up sorting scrolls for the other scribes. Most days were like this for him, and however much he tried, he simply could not lose himself in his own thoughts because this job required a bit of concentration, just not enough to keep it interesting. This meant that anything that happened that was out of the ordinary stuck with him, and this was what turned the day into one that he would remember forever.

When he was busy sorting, he briefly skim-read the first few lines of each of the scrolls. One delivery, which came in the midmorning, was a set of scrolls detailing how the palace's budget had been spent on things like the upkeep for the slaves or paying for repairs on the ageing roofs. Given that this was at least slightly interesting and that, if he wasn't careful, he would likely finish his work early, leaving him with nothing to do, Kira read through several of the papers and noticed several differences between them.

A good deal of money had been spent purchasing several demi-human slaves that had then seemingly disappeared and had never been assigned to any particular group within the palace. This shouldn't have concerned him because he didn't want to end up involved in something that he shouldn't be. But, given that there was little to do, and simply asking someone about it would not seem too suspicious if he framed it as him simply trying to help point out a potential mistake, he asked James about it. James, apparently, had not noticed this himself and spent several minutes poring over the papers to see the problem for himself.

Looking over James' shoulder as he worked and scratched at his head, attempting to explain to himself how this sort of mistake could have occurred, another scribe noted that he had seen a representative of the palace on one of his days off purchasing slaves on the days detailed. The mistake, therefore, must not have been with the purchase itself but rather with someone forgetting to note down where the new slaves had been assigned.

Before James had even looked back up at him with a slightly apologetic expression, Kira knew that he had made a mistake. "Could you go and check with that slave management office that this is right? You must have been there before…."

"Sure," replied Kira, his heart sinking. Talk about sticking his nose where it didn't belong!

Sensing Kira's disappointment, James added, "It's probably nothing," as the office door closed behind him, and Kira stepped out into the open corridor, briefly taking his bearings, heading towards that office and that manipulator. This manipulator was exactly who he didn't want to see as he progressed with his own manipulations because he feared that the fact he was a manipulator himself may be becoming a little too obvious.

When he arrived outside the relevant door, he knocked several times and, like before, he thought he heard someone calling him inside. However, when he entered, he realized that he must have been mistaken because there was no one inside, so he must have imagined the voice. The door hadn't been locked, and he had a reasonable reason to be there, so he approached the central desk and stood before it, unsure as to what to do.

After a period of waiting, he decided that he should probably think about returning to the other scribes, where he was meant to be. Slightly nervous about being found, he started pacing through the room, looking for a scrap piece of paper on which he could write a request for the manipulator to check through the details of the scrolls that he left neatly piled on an empty corner of the desk. His first visit to this room had been brief and was blurred in his memory, but now he had a chance to explore it properly and began to fully appreciate the paintings hanging on the wall.

At first glance, they may appear to have been nothing but splashes of colour but, because of his first dream or vision, he quickly recognized them as depicting swirling patterns of aura moving in similar dances of creation that he had seen presided over by the Progenitors. These weren't nearly so grand and, being still images, they seemed to lack the power to completely overtake him – an ability that he had half expected based on his previous visions. Rather than doubting his capacity to understand them, he instead doubted their validity as proper depictions of such motions and assumed that they were incomplete or inadequate in their reproduction.

Along the back of the room were many free-standing sets of drawers that stood as tall as he was and shone with an oaken sheen. Whatever they contained seemed important as most of the drawers were fastened shut by locks, but his attention was quickly taken and directed towards a single drawer, at the height of his knees, with its padlock hanging open. Knowing that what he was doing was wrong, but gripped by a sense of urgency and completely forgetting his purpose for being there, he pulled off the lock and watched, from an almost third-person perspective, as it clacked onto the floor. It opened easily, too easily, for such a heavy drawer as it was packed high with papers.

Thrusting his hand into the mess of scrolls and pushing far through them, his hand closed around one in particular that he drew out of the frothing sea of others to bring it to the surface. Opening it to its widest extent and glancing through it, he saw hundreds of small symbols, writing, in a language that he could not recognize. Held at their centre, and filling a good fifth of the scroll, was one that he did.

The symbol of the Progenitors was on that scroll. It sat defiantly in his vision, two interlocking masses of white and black, depicting how in all good there is evil and how in all evil there is good. The symbol caused all others to swirl around it, and he struggled to pull his eyes away as they kept snapping back to it.

His resolve was stronger than before, as he was now well on his way to learning how to be a competent manipulator himself, and he found the strength within himself to snap shut the scroll and thrust it back, deep, into the drawer with the others. He then banged shut the drawer itself and closed the lock over it. However, the outline of the Progenitor's symbol was still etched into his vision and distorted what he could see behind it.

The room swirled as the symbols of the paintings came alive, all drawn in closer by the Progenitor's mark. Their colours danced around him, filled with brilliant reds, fluorescent oranges and deep royal purples. He was then forced to watch as his body, moving more by a sense of touch than vision as the room spun, approached one of the paintings.

It was the largest in the room and took up almost the entirety of one of the walls, and it now seemed to possess something that no painting ever should, depth. It called to him, calling him inside and he again heard the voice that had called him inside the room, not from the painting and certainly not from the manipulator.

Instead, it came from whatever was crouching just behind the barrier before him. And then it did something else that he had never witnessed a painting do before; its centre fell in on itself, warping into a passage that led back through what should have been a solid wall. He watched as his body, working against any desperate signal that he could give it, stepped forwards into this space.

The painting's darkness engulfed him.

He could not see, and he could not feel; there was nothing to do but wait for the dark to leave.

This did not happen. But slowly, ever so damn slowly, his feelings returned.

This started in his fingers and toes as he gradually felt their warmth, and he touched his chest with his hands just to confirm that they were there. Over time, the rest of his body returned to him, and he felt his heart beat, and he felt his lungs expanding and then contracting to inhale and expel air at a rate instructed by him. Then came something else that he could not get away from, an excruciating expectation that if he stopped consciously controlling his breathing rate, he would suffocate.

As such, there was nothing to do. He had just enough strength left in him to crouch, feeling the pressure build-up in his knees and rock forwards and backwards, careful to not overbalance on the cold floor. His ears were working again, but the voice he had heard before had been replaced by screams and the roars of distant, raging monsters. Was he in a kind of hell? It was hard to tell, and he begged his eyes to open if only he could see and then perhaps he would know, one way or another.

Rocking gently, he laughed internally at his own stupidity; why oh why enter the damn painting? But, even as he did this, he knew that the answer was simple. He hadn't entered it, something else had made him enter it, and he had just watched, helpless as his body had walked into unknown danger. A terrible idea then overwhelmed him, one that told him that he was no longer safe in his own body and that it had the potential and the malicious nature required to betray him at any time or anywhere. Before he properly understood their presence, tears were running down his cheeks, and he rocked forwards just a little too much and fell.

Falling did not take him long. Just a second later, his head contacted the floor, and his eyes snapped open.

Argh! He shouted at himself internally, not knowing the words to describe his condition. Why hadn't they worked before? And shortly afterwards, he knew why, as they had been closed and he had merely forgotten to open them, although, in this context, merely seemed to be an understatement.

Sitting up, he cursed his body for taking him here as he looked around and came to terms with where he was. The cold floor belonged to a sloping stone corridor moving down into the palace's bowls. Behind him was a flat black wall that was decidedly without a symbol or handle with which to access a way back. This meant that he had only one option and would have to go forwards and into the unknown but, before he could try this, he had to wait a little while to become more confident again in his own ability to stand and move without his body acting, or falling, without him. This gave him plenty of time to fully regret bothering to raise any initial concern about discrepancies between budgets in some stupid scrolls.

His memory of just a few minutes ago, if it had been a few minutes ago when he had noticed these differences felt so ancient that he wondered if it had been a few minutes ago at all and if some additional time had already passed. Such a hypothesis would have to wait to be proven before being turned into the internal theory in his mind, and he shakily got to his feet and, using the adjacent walls to support him, started on his way.

Before long, he reached a junction in the passageway and elected to turn off and to the right seeing how the main route, which swung left, had collapsed in on itself fifty feet further along. Despite evidently being underground, he could see well because of torches placed in holders along either wall and, as there was little smoke, he concluded that he couldn't be very deep and that there had to be slim chimney-like structures leading to the surface. This was confirmed when he felt a weak breeze of cool air passing by him as he passed a torch, and he wondered if these slits led up to the palace gardens if he was actually below the palace at all.

Walking forwards, piercing inhuman shrieks became louder, which hardly seemed to be a promising sign given that his only escape route was a dead end. The occasional drafts now also brought with them smells that seemed so vile that he wondered if he was heading for some sort of sewer system, which would make at least some sense if he was still underneath Ostermark. It would not take much longer for him to uncover the source of all this because, shortly after the passage had flattened out and no longer headed further underground, he rounded a corner and could see it.

Cages, the corridor widened so that it was surrounded by cells on either side. These must have been the source of the cries and the smell. But, as he looked, preparing himself to slink backwards and out of sight to try and keep his presence a secret, he realized that none of the cages were occupied. Emboldened by this, he gingerly moved forwards, careful to not make any noise himself.

Each one was a couple of strides wide and extended by about three paces back from the central path that they were separated from by metal bars. They were much like the cage that Kira had spent a night in waiting to be bought when he first arrived in Ostermark, as these too had no comforts for any residents. They completely lacked in any beds, and only a couple had sheets laid across the floor for sleeping on or a small bucket in one corner for another use. These buckets looked to have been filled recently because they were the source of the smell that now filled the air so thickly that it was nearly visible like a mist.

From towards the end of the passageway, where it turned off to the right so that he could see no further, he again heard the inhuman sounds from before that were now much closer, reminding him to take care in how he proceeded. Stopping for a moment to gather his thoughts, he glanced at the cage to his left and saw, contained within it, something that the others had lacked, a demi-human. They lay facing away from him and unsure what to do, Kira concentrated his aura in front of his eyes to look at them and confirm whether or not they were alive. But, they completely lacked any aura of their own. The reason for this was not obvious when he moved closer because they seemed to have no visible injury.

Quickly backing away, Kira assumed that their death was likely to have been caused by the monster, or monsters, that he kept hearing crying out from just ahead of him. Despite his apprehension of what he might find, he had no choice but to continue onwards, leaving the corpse alone behind him. Keeping himself hidden, crouching within the shadows, he rounded one final corner into a wider circular space surrounded by cages similar to those he had previously passed. In the centre of the room, in a lowered pit, was a much larger cage, but he could not see what was held within it.

However, the cells around the edge of the space contained demi-humans who he thought could have been the missing slaves. Several were missing their characteristic ears and tails, but this was common among slave rings because demi-humans disguised as humans could be sold for a greater price. What seemed most strange about them was how the majority were staring blankly forward as though stripped of all sentience, and a couple sat stiffly on the floor, helping to produce the grating noises that Kira had previously attributed to some monsters. He simply didn't know what to make of the scene in front of him.

Not certain as to what to do but confident that he couldn't return the way he came, he concentrated his aura in front of his eyes to better look at the captives. When looking at the demi-humans, he could hardly distinguish them from their surroundings as living beings. They were different from any other people that he observed in some way that seemed to decrease their observable presence.

While being altered from what he had expected, their aura also felt different from anything else that was living that he had previously encountered, as though they were even less alive than a small animal. From seeing this, it didn't take Kira long to realize what had happened to them and that their aura looked like it had been changed by an outside force.

This left only one possibility that a manipulator had purposefully attacked their aura, in a similar way to how he had done in the past, but instead of killing them outright, they had changed it into something completely new that distinguished them from anything else that was living. At least in that sense, then, they were no longer living and were just as dead as the one that he had seen abandoned in one of the other cages that he had passed.

The purpose of this alteration was difficult to guess, but he instinctively felt that there was no way for it to be good. Trying to strain his senses in order to find a way past these moving corpses whilst unravelling their purpose, Kira caught the tail end of a quiet wisp of a word. Not knowing where it had come from and doubting the ability of any of these former demi-humans to make such a noise, he sat back and waited for a few seconds to see if any other familiar noise could be heard. For the longest while, no such noise came and when he heard a second word, carried to him on a slow breeze, he took a step forward to try and hear it better.

Doing this was something that he immediately regretted because that step, as timidly small as it was, took him out of the shadows and into the view of all of the monsters held in their cages around the room. There was no question about whether or not they would be able to see him, and he froze like a deer caught in the vision of a ferocious wolf.

But there was no response. The former people went about their business, mainly sitting quietly and looking as though they were held deep in thought, as though he was not there. Letting himself breathe again, after remembering that he was holding his breath, Kira straightened up to stand at his full height, taking the pressure away from his knees that thanked him for it. Of course, they won't respond to me, he told himself, they're essentially dead! With this newfound confidence in knowing that it didn't matter if he was seen, he approached the central pit.

Below its crisscrossing dome of iron bars, the pit went a few paces down below the rest of the floor and had a diameter of about ten strides, with its own floor being covered by sand that was occasionally stained red with blood. Opposite to his position, a sloped passage allowed access to the pit from the rest of the room, and it was guarded by two iron doors with one at either end. Held within the centre of the circular space was a wooden post that reached up and helped to support the dome that separated the pit from the rest of the space. Chained to the log was a demi-human woman, and two other figures stood before her, talking with one another. Kira was able to immediately recognize both of them.

Slightly to the right stood the manipulator that had given him his mark and who he was supposed to have asked about the problems with the scrolls, and to the left stood Lady Meera. The manipulator was wearing the blue robe that showed his belonging to Krinestadt and talked animatedly with her. Kira struggled to remain close enough to hear what they were saying whilst not making his presence too obvious all the time wondering what Lady Meera was doing in a place like this.

For the manipulator, it only made too much sense as the ability that he had demonstrated, whether it be his secondary or primary ability, had been to do with the control of slaves, but the Lady of Ostermark had never struck Kira as the sort of person that would involve herself in this. But, thinking a moment longer, he thought that it actually was not too far away from her established character as he had known her to be rather dishonourable in her dealings with opposing lords. Perhaps she was not so innocent as she made out.

Precisely what they were talking about was difficult to make out, and he could only hear snippets from their conversation. "The slave… one hundred and thirty-seven…" the manipulator began.

"There… some sort of progress?" Meera asked him.

What the manipulator then said in reply was hard to understand, but one word stuck out to Kira, puppets, because he assumed it applied to the dead-but-alive demi-humans. Puppet did indeed seem a good word to use for those people that had been changed in such a weird way, and he supposed that it must have had something to do with their purpose.

Unfortunately, he did not have long to think because they ended their conversation there, and the manipulator went to hold open the first door out of the pit, waiting patiently for Lady Meera to follow. Panicking as he did not want to be seen, Kira frantically looked around the edge of the room. The only obvious exit was back the way that he had come, and so he headed for it, keeping low to the ground and trying to simultaneously move silently and with some degree of speed.

This did not work particularly well as he made some noise leaving the room, but it did not seem to have been loud enough to alert Lady Meera and her colleague and he was able to round the corner, going away from the room, completely unscathed.

Whilst retracing his steps, he could hear the footsteps of two other people following after him, but not moving in an urgent manner, and he thought that this must mean that there was an exit that he had missed in these twisting underground passages. As he went further and further back, reaching the point where the path started to slope upwards once more, his anxiety grew because he was certain that he had not seen a way out before this point. Turning left to return to where he started, he wondered if he had picked the wrong route because he found himself back in front of the same smooth, black wall as before.

This illusion was shattered when he again heard footsteps approaching him. He must have gone the right way, and there had to be a way out! Not seeing anything obvious presenting itself on the stone walls, he pushed against the black surface, hoping to fall through in the same manner he had entered. No such thing occurred but, instead, the wall leant away from him and then slid onto the floor of the manipulator's office before him as though it had just been hanging on a nail.

This was because it had been; the black wall had merely been the back of the large painting on the office wall! Angry with his own stupidity, Kira carefully edged around it into the office and picked it up to hang it back on the wall. Although it was not completely straight, he figured that that would have to do and snatched up his scrolls, which were still stacked neatly on the desk, before heading out into the corridor.

He hadn't fallen through anything then, he thought, he had simply gone behind the painting but any further thinking about this and why such a large underground lair was there would have to wait because now he had a decision to make. Would he go back to James empty-handed after so much time, or would he innocently knock on the office door to question the manipulator about the discrepancies despite what he had seen? Deciding that carrying out his assigned task would seem less suspicious, he waited for a couple of minutes to give time for Lady Meera and the manipulator to get back past the painting before knocking on the door.

It was opened by Lady Meera, who stepped out past him whilst smiling sweetly towards him, "I've heard only the best things about you," she said, taking him off guard with how kind she seemed despite having just come from activities that seemed to involve stripping innocent people of their aura, "You're here to see Jake?"

"Yes," Kira replied, guessing that she meant the manipulator, so that was his name, Jake. It hardly seemed to fit him, but maybe it had one time in his past back when he was a different person than who he was now. Given that the door was open, he was able to call directly into the room, "May I enter? I have some scrolls that need checking…."

"Certainly," Jake shouted back, gesturing friendlily towards him, also seeming completely unfazed by what he had been doing.

Closing the door behind him, Kira entered and laid the scrolls on the table, "There seems to have been a mistake made because the amount spent on new slaves doesn't match up with the number received," explained Kira.

Jake made humphed in response before opening and looking across the scrolls under Kira's direction. This took an awfully long time because Jake had to take out his own pair of thick glasses, which he held in front of his face, to read the small characters. During this time, Kira worried that he would get himself into some trouble inquiring about this now that he knew what the reason for the discrepancy was, but Jake didn't seem to mind the question as he probably just assumed that Kira was innocently trying to correct a mistake. When he had finished looking them over, Jake declared that he would make the changes himself and ushered Kira from the room, telling Kira to go back to the scribes' office, taking his own goodwill with him.