Chapter 75 The desperate King
The man who had dealt with Val watched him leave the Crows’ front office, the pleasant customer service smile freezing on his face until the door clicked shut. Then, like a mask removed, his expression dissolved into cold, analytical seriousness.
He looked down at the sealed letter in his hands, then hefted the heavy purse Val had left behind. The weight was absurd. For this amount of gold, a man could buy a remote village, fund a small rebellion, or live in decadent comfort for a decade. To spend it all on a single message? It defied the logic of even the most extravagant noble.
Something was deeply suspicious. A whisper of paranoia, bred from a lifetime in the shadows, told him this was not mere eccentricity. It was a something. He summoned a junior operative with a sharp gesture.
“The customer is heading to The Gilded Pinion.Have him watched. Not aggressive and not approached. I want to know if he meets anyone, if he tries to leave the city, if a bird so much as lands on his windowsill. Understood?”
The operative nodded and melted away. The man, whose name in the ledgers was Kael, turned and moved through a series of back corridors within the building. His destination was not another office, but a discreet, unmarked door in the basement.
He produced a unique, tubular key from a chain around his neck, inserted it, and turned. The door did not open onto another room. Instead, a shimmering field of mana resolved, and Kael stepped through, finding himself instantly in a different part of Tartiib entirely ,a secure, windowless warehouse in the industrial quarter.
This was a Crow’s nest of a different kind and their verification center. In the middle of the vast space stood a monolithic apparatus of gleaming brass and etched blue crystal, humming with a low, potent energy.
It was the Oculus, a state of the art arcane scanner, one of the kingdom’s most closely guarded secrets. Nothing physical or mystical could hope to bypass its analysis.
Kael approached and placed Val’s sealed letter on the pristine white mithril table that served as the machine’s intake platform. He sealed the heavy crystal dome over it. “Full spectrum analysis,” he ordered. “Lethal, latent, lyrical, and legacy. Leave no resonance unread.”
A technician at a control panel nodded. “Beginning now.” He threw a series of levers.
The Oculus awoke. Five concentric rings of mana, each a different color, ignited around the letter, making it levitate within the dome.
Through the crystal, Kael watched as beams of light—some visible, some not swept over the parchment and the wax seal. Runes flared along the machine’s casing, reporting their findings in a silent, magical language. The air smelled of ozone and hot metal.
The process took only five minutes. The machine’s temperature died down, and the letter settled back onto the table. The technician scanned the final readout, his brow furrowed. “Sir… it’s clean. No contact poisons, no explosive glyphs, no psychic impressions, no cursed artifacts, no delayed scrying triggers. The ink is common oak gall, the paper is milled flax from the southern plains, the wax is standard beeswax with a generic crest. It is, by all accounts, a normal envelope.”
Kael stared, his suspicion deepening into profound confusion. Clean? The Oculus had never been wrong. The man had paid a king’s ransom to send a harmless piece of paper? Was he a fool with more money than sense? Kael briefly entertained the idea that someone could have engineered a method to fool the Oculus, but dismissed it. The machine was the pinnacle of royal artifice, bypassing it was a theoretical fantasy.
“I guess he truly was just sending a letter,” Kael muttered, the words tasting odd. But the question remained ,why? The temptation to break the seal and read the contents was powerful.
What message could be worth such a price? His hand twitched toward the dome. But he stopped. His mandate was clear. Its to ensure the item’s safety, not its confidentiality. To open it would be to break the Crow’s prime contract and the Crows were nothing if not professional. Besides, he reasoned, what written words could possibly threaten the King of Graham?
“Package it for immediate royal dispatch,” Kael commanded. “Use the Swiftwing route.”
---
The capital city of the Kingdom of Graham shared the kingdom’s name, a practice begun in more optimistic, expansive times. Graham the city had once been grand, a testament to Balmur’s regional power. Now, it simply felt old. Its wide boulevards seemed too large for the modest traffic they carried; its statues of past kings wore expressions that now seemed wistful rather than commanding. Glory had faded into the past.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Kael, entering through a secret gate known only to the Crows and the monarch and did not bother with the sightseeing. He passed through a disguised door in a garden wall and descended into a smooth, magically lit tunnel that led directly into the heart of the royal palace’s private wing.
It was the king’s emergency escape route, and its existence was a secret more closely guarded than the treasury. If it were ever compromised, the 156 defensive artifacts embedded in the palace walls would be the king’s only hope.
He waited in a small, austere antechamber. Before long, a side door opened and King Asur Valir del Rie entered.
The man who should have embodied confidence, dignity, and royal pride did not look the part in the least. King Asur was in his late forties, but strain had carved years into his face.
His shoulders were bowed under an invisible weight, and his eyes, once reputedly sharp and lively, now held the hollow look of a man perpetually braced for the next blow. The vibrant vitality of his early reign had decayed, eaten away by the relentless pressure of a kingdom in quiet freefall.
“What is the matter now, Kael?” the king asked, his voice weary. It wasn’t a greeting, but a sigh given sound.
Kael bowed, not out of deep ceremony, but professional habit. “A commissioned delivery, Your Majesty. Highest priority, highest fee. Scanned and cleared by the Oculus. The client demanded it reach your hand directly.” He offered the letter.
King Asur took it, his fingers slightly clumsy. He wasn’t always like this. There had been a time of reform plans, infrastructure projects, and diplomatic overtures. But no matter what he did, it was as if the kingdom had its own will, a gravitational pull toward dissolution.
The economy resisted stimulation, the nobility squabbled or conspired, other kingdoms looked upon Graham with pity or predatory interest, and the common people suffered in a grinding, quiet misery. Every initiative seemed to spiral into failure with unbelievable speed.
For King Asur, the options had dwindled to being crushed by the collapse or watching it happen from a helpless distance.
He broke the plain seal, unfolded the single sheet, and read the brief, typed message.
Dangerous and suspicious individuals are assembling what is presumed to be a mass weapon in Veor.
He read it again. Then a third time. A strange, almost hysterical laugh threatened to bubble up. A mass weapon? In Veor, that sleepy city by the forest? It sounded like the plot of a bad melodrama. Was this some noble’ idea of a prank?
But the king’s paranoia, a constant companion these days, whispered otherwise. What if it’s true? What if, in your despair, you miss the one threat that could finally end it all? The sheer, outrageous cost of the message itself argued against a prank. This was a warning someone was desperate to send, from someone who knew the Crows.
He looked up at Kael, his dejection momentarily overridden by a flicker of grim decision. “Have the Crows in Veor investigate. Verify the truth of this. Discreetly. If it is a fiction, I want to know who spent a fortune to spread it. If it is fact…” He trailed off, the implications too vast to voice.
Kael bowed again. “It will be done, Your Majesty.” The Crows did not care if the king took the threat seriously or not. An order was an order. Their professionalism was absolute, whether the task was retrieving a stolen necklace or guarding the king’s life. The standard was the same. Utmost effort.
---
In Veor, the Crow stirred to life with efficiency. The local branch, operating out as a perfumery and a bathhouse, deployed its agents. They did not alert the city watch or stir the populace. This was a shadow operation.
They began at the city’s outer walls and started working inward in a slow, meticulous grid. Agents with subtle devices,pendulums that detected mana concentrations, enchanted loupes that saw residual heat signatures.
It was tedious, quiet work. Hours passed. Then, an agent near the industrial fringe stiffened. The small crystal orb in his palm, which had glowed a steady blue, suddenly pulsed a deep, alarming crimson. The silent alarm vibrated up his arm. He made a quick hand signal.
Reinforcements converged with ghostly quiet, until a team of eight surrounded the abandoned steelworks. Their leader, a woman with grey streaked hair named Lira, assembled a larger device from a carrying case. It was a bulky, disc shaped scanner. She placed it against the foundation of the factory, activating it.
A soft chime sounded, and a three dimensional map of the subterranean complex bloomed in the air above the disc a labyrinth of tunnels, chambers, and what appeared to be one large, central vault. The schematic was stunning in its complexity. This was no simple hideout.
“Breach team,” Lira whispered, pointing to two of their most agile operatives. “Map is synced to your guides. In and out. Visual confirmation only. Do not engage.”
The two agents, clad in night black gear that seemed to drink the light, nodded. Using a non magical solvent, they silently melted a man sized hole through a rust weakened section of the factory’s basement wall and slipped inside, their own smaller guide orbs projecting the map before them.
The team outside settled into a watch pattern. Minutes ticked by, stretching into a half hour, then an hour. Lira’s calm began to fray. The breach team had periodic check ins mandated every fifteen minutes. Silence had followed their first, all-clear entry signal.
Another hour passed. The sun outside began to dip towards the horizon. The factory loomed, silent and dark.
A third hour bled away. The twilight deepened.
Inside the warehouse turned command post, the silence was no longer calm,it was oppressive. Lira stared at the map display. The blinking markers for her two agents had stopped moving an hour ago, deep within the maze, near the central vault. They had not gone silent because they were lost,the guide orbs would have led them out. They had not been discovered accidentally either,Crows were trained to evade and escape.
They had been taken. Swiftly, utterly, and without a chance to call for help.
Lira’s face, usually an impassive mask, paled. She looked from the hauntingly detailed map to the dark, gaping hole in the factory wall, and then to the worried faces of her remaining team.
“Seal the point of entry,” she said, her voice low and tight. “Fall back to secondary observation points. No one else goes in.” She took a steadying breath, the weight of the conclusion settling on them all.
