Chapter 29: 12.2: Trouble in Dakheng II

The nobles were gone, and I was alone in Jasmine’s house.

It was, to be fair, probably the best place to be alone in the entire city. The house was massive on a scale that I had almost forgotten was suitable for residences. I was sure that even if I slept in a new bedroom every day, I could make it a month without repeating a room. That was just the bedrooms, too—the estate was truly incredible in size, especially for a building in Yaguan of all places.

It was a restless night. I’d gone to bed shortly after seeing Jasmine off at the train station, but I’d gotten up after half an hour of tossing and turning. There wasn’t going to be any sleep soon, I could recognize that easily, and so I had decided to stop wasting my time.

Jasmine’s estate was expansive, but exploring it felt like I was trespassing somewhere where I shouldn’t. On another level, living here felt unearned. I had no complaints about it, but it wasn’t quite mine.

I ignored the dozens upon dozens of rooms, opting instead to head outside. Jasmine’s estate sprawled out across an excessive amount of land, and it took me a bit to navigate my way out of the flower garden out front. Once I made it out, though, it was a matter of moments before I was among the tall, packed buildings of the city proper.

The streets and the rooftops around them had been my second home in Syashan, a place I could go when the neighborhood mothers were falling on hard times and couldn’t afford to host me. Even if they weren’t awfully high, there was just something magical about having total freedom, and there was no deity involved in this one. I took to them again, the stiff night breeze a nostalgic chill at the back of my neck.

A furtive glance around confirmed that nobody was out at this hour. It wasn’t quite midnight yet, so the night drinkers were probably still in the taverns closer to the city center. There would be guards, but the outer edges of the city didn’t have too many.

I found a convenient set of balconies and scrabbled my way up four stories, climbing methodically up the face of an apartment. I was no experienced hand at summiting urban buildings, but the balconies were easy enough to climb up. They were designed with handholds meant to help people out of the buildings in the event of a fire, which was awfully convenient for me after I’d gotten a little bit of the way up.

The roof was slanted gently, and its tiles were rickety. One almost fell out when I stepped on it. Still more durable than they’d been back at the village, but the quality of the brick looked higher. Fewer crumbling patches, that was for sure.

Yaguan looked different from an elevated perspective. The roof I stood on wasn’t the tallest in the city, not by a long shot, but I could still see over a lot. I could see the way the city was assembled in a series of a dozen rings, how it shone dully with the oathlights illuminating the streets.

At day, I knew, there would be people teeming in every ring, giving life to a bustling city. Now, though, there was nobody apart from an odd straggler on their way to or from a tavern.

I sighed, and I barely noticed that I had begun to walk forward until I nearly slid on the tiles.

I breathed deep, enjoying the sensation of the crisp air in my lungs, and I looked off towards the distance. There was a buzz infusing every bone in my body, an urge to get something done.

All at once, I burst into a sprint, heedless of the way that my first and second steps knocked loose tiles off the roof. I put every fibre of my body into my run. My heart grew loud as I ran, the wind and the pumping of blood the only sound in my ears.

The roof ended, and there was a gap nearly three meters wide to the next one, a flat paved one that had weeds sprouting out of cracks.

It’s a long way down. I ignored the voice of reason, belated as it was. Sure, I wouldn’t want to fall here, but my soul screamed and drowned out any concerns I should’ve had.

I leaped, a hint of magic infusing my legs, and my heart leapt with me. I overshot entirely. I landed hard, not prepared for the impact, and I dropped into a forward roll to burn my momentum off. I got up to my knees, breathing hard. Adrenaline surged through my body, and I burned to go further.

I still felt restless. There was a fluttering in my heart, a pressure weighing down on it, and I knew that I had to go somewhere. I’d stored energy like an oath-battery, and I needed some way to release it. All that, and I still had no idea where I was going. I didn’t like the feeling.

Directionless. That was the word. I could wander all I liked, sprint across a thousand different roofs, but at the end of the day that feeling would still be tearing me apart from the core.

“What the fuck is wrong with me?” I whispered, my words stolen by the wind for nobody to hear.

I had been just fine growing up basically on my own. I didn’t even need to ask what my ultimate destination was. It was and always had been the reclamation of the Byron name.

And now, despite knowing what I wanted to do, despite knowing that I had established my position well and was positioned for growth on my path, I still didn’t know what I wanted.

I hated this. Hated feeling like this.

What had changed? I was purposeful, always had been, but now… I wasn’t.

I knew the answer, I realized, and I slowed down as the realization hit me.

Jasmine. It was Jasmine.

My legs were burning, now, and a glance behind me revealed that I hadn’t exactly been the most discreet with my sprinting. Hopefully, nobody was in the habit of checking their rooftops, because I hadn’t left a single rooftop without at least a spot of cosmetic damage.

It had been her all along, hadn’t it? The noble girl had wormed her way into my life that day at the Adventurer’s Guild, and she had made herself comfortable there.

I’d grown comfortable with her there.

The realization didn’t help me any. Who was I, to hate everything that nobles were and stood for just to drop the act the moment a pretty face asked me to join her?

I dropped to my knees, the air suddenly suffocating. I felt a little dizzy, now, and my breaths were becoming gasps for air.

There is no way I'd fall for a noble, I reassured myself. She’s a good friend, that’s all.

A good friend, but one good enough that my thoughts of her refused to exit my mind.

“Fuck,” I muttered.

As much as I hated to admit it, she was a human connection, and a good one at that. Jasmine was a genuinely good person, and the first one to reach out to me for a reason other than pity. I had a good grasp of my own emotions, I was pretty sure, and of course I knew that I hadn’t been given much love in my childhood.

Still, was that enough to justify… this? The restlessness, the desire to get out of this place?

Unfortunately, for the time being, my answer had to be yes.

“Fuck,” I repeated, and I stood myself back up, inhaling as deep as I could and holding it. I let the breath out slowly, hugging myself tightly as I did, and it helped to release some of the tension I’d been building up.

I looked around, and I found areas where the oathlights shone a little stronger. The taverns, the brothels, the train stations…

The Tayan Adventurers Guild.

Gods fucking damn it all, I thought, and I started moving towards the brick and wood building.

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“Quests from a specific location?”

The receptionist was different again today. An older man, this time. His hair was greying, and he wore thick glasses. He looked like he could’ve been a professor or a particularly eccentric professor, but he’d chosen this line of work instead.

“Yes,” I confirmed. “Dakheng.”

“The capital, eh?” the receptionist said. He looked at me over his glasses, a glint of light reflecting off of them into my eyes. “So soon after another quest?”

Another quest?

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I looked down at myself. Oh. Right.

I was a bit of a mess. I’d worn normal clothes out to the rooftops, and they weren’t totally suited for it. My shirt was a little torn where it had caught on the wall when I’d been climbing down, and everything was dusty enough that it looked like I’d taken a bad fall in a barn.

“I’ll be fine, I’m unhurt,” I said, waving off his question. “Is there anything? My oathholder class is five, if you need that.”

“Five…” the man trailed off. “No party?”

“No,” I said, the word tasting surprisingly sour on my tongue. “Just add me to another, I’ll be fine.”

“There’s not much going on in Dakheng, most of the time. I’m not sure if there is anything.” He clicked his tongue, flipping through a massive block of quest requests. Something in there must’ve caught his interest, because the sound of shuffling papers stopped and he cocked his head.

“Is there—“ my words caught in my throat, and I winced at how desperate I sounded even to myself. I tried to take my mind off the subject, thinking about my past. An image of my father passing through my mind was enough to do it, and when I spoke again, my voice was coated in a layer of frost. “Are there any offerings?”

“You’re in luck,” he said. “I almost never see quests from Dakheng pass my desk, but there just so happens to be one today. A new one, looks like. Here.”

He passed me a sheet of paper, the posting dense with writing.

“Next,” the receptionist said. “If you want to reject this quest, just let me know, miss…”

“Syashan,” I said, only half-heeding his words.

“Miss Syashan. It’s an odd quest, you know. Dangerous to go alone.”

I nodded, already walking away. I made my way to a quiet corner—well, as quiet as the Guild could ever get, at least—and sat down, bending over my legs.

This quest had a lot of thick legal information on it, multiple paragraphs dedicated to ‘liabilities’ and ‘obligations’, but the core of it was pretty simple.

The request was from House Alzaq. They must not have been very prominent when I’d been young, because the name didn’t spark any memories.

They were conducting an independent investigation, as most Houses were probably doing, but they were unique in that they were newer to power and hadn’t established a strong private force to maintain their position.

House Alzaq wants to investigate a specific matter discreetly, but we need a team to keep our investigators from getting killed on the job.

Well, the paper didn’t actually say that, but that was essentially what it boiled down to. All of the established nobles had a veritable private army, but House Alzaq tended towards pacifism and needed some muscle.

That was fine by me. It was likely going to take the better part of a week, but then the YMU was fairly flexible with the classes required to pass the first year. They knew that a good portion of their students were going to be training for something outside of class, whether that was research, apprenticeships, military boot camp, or...

I massaged my lower legs, the soreness from my rooftop run making itself apparent. They still stung where they hadn’t fully healed from the slices given to me by the primordial.

Adventuring was certainly an option that the school considered, but even though I had grown accustomed to it, I could physically feel how insane this line of work was.

I felt that insanity even more keenly on this job, but that was less adventuring and more me. Travelling half the kingdom just to be with the friend I’d made?

I continued reading the letter, and I was surprised when I found a section that wasn’t all that obscured by legalese.

In short: House Alzaq needs your help to safely identify what the other Houses are doing and what the commoners are doing such that we may increase our standing for the Crown.

I stopped short at that line. Those words were words I’d heard before.

…help us have a better shot at the Crown…

…stop the Tempets from their push for the Crown…

…wouldn’t understand. It’s all for the Crown…

Memories sparked, a series of recollections. Images, snippets of sounds, phrases half-remembered, and it all reminded me of a cold man with unfeeling eyes, drinking tea in a lavish study as he determined the optimal number of people to kill for the praise of the kingdom.

My father.

The coldness I’d forced into my voice earlier was back, and it had grown in intensity.

Never forget. I’d made a promise to myself, way back then, to never let another House Byron happen again.

To never overlook the wrongs of nobility again.

As kind, sweet, and moral as she was, Jasmine was still a fucking noble. Alex was a noble. Lukas was a noble’s retainer.

I had been part of their world, once, and one day I would return.

In the meantime, though, there had to be someone to keep them in line. There were too many nobles just like the former House Byron patriarch and matriarch that always sought more, greedy hands groping for any opportunity to uplift themselves and give a blind eye to their opponents.

Crabs in a bucket, I’d once heard it referred to as. Able to climb out if they worked for the common good but never managing to do so, pulling others down so that they could never rise above the rest.

That was what nobles were, at the heart of it. A vicious cycle of backstabbing, violence, and lies, all while pretending at being better than any person from the street.

I finished reading the quest, the irritating thoughts from earlier dissipating into a deep corner of my mind.

There was a job to be done, and I was going to finish it.

If I had to embarrass a few noble families on the way? All the better.

I made my way out of the TAG with a purpose in mind and a comforting coldness permeating my being on a level beyond the physical. The restlessness in my heart was still there, but it was slower now, controlled. It was something I could ignore while I pursued the task at hand.

I checked the mission posting again. One ticket for a train, one-way to Dakheng. An address.

“To House Alzaq,” I whispered, holding the paper up like I was giving a toast. “For reminding me of reason.”

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