Chapter 11: - Geometry of Violence

  Navtej did not leave Father’s office happily, but he left with a lot to think on.

  He focused on the thing he could actually do something about—Exia Vanfoster—the King. I shouldn’t have punched him. That, at least, Father was right about. It wasn’t his fault that Father had decided to abandon him, and even if it was, Navtej had sworn never to be a man of violence.

  He walked through the King’s palace in search of him, making his way past soldiers, maids, and servants who all avoided meeting his eyes.

  How could a house so filled with people feel so lonely? He’d been here less than a day and could already feel the stark difference between this manor and his humble home in Putesh. Papa, Baba, and Nana would organise meals not just for the whole household, but for the community as well.

  Navtej could still remember the scent of kumri stew in the air, the joking, the laughter, the warmth. Gone now. Here, only cold walls, stoic soldiers, and tasteless soup awaited him.

  Navtej entered the gardens, eyes scanning the area for the King. He saw sign of neither him nor the ugly man he’d been talking with. That was somewhat annoying. Perhaps he’d just have to muster up the courage to ask one of the cold maids where the King’s quarters were, and he could go and apologize there.

  Navtej turned and—something hit him, fast, heavy and hard.

  He was on the ground within moments, glasses dislodged and world spinning. Something kissed his neck, cold, hard and sharp—metal. He froze. For a long moment there was nothing but the cold claws of fear sinking into his heart.

  Was he going to die like this? Cut out open and left to bleed out into the grass.

  “Listen to me you bronze, pig-smelling, piece of shit,” death hissed, and Navtej recognised it as the voice of the King. It sounded nothing like the one he’d heard earlier however, all jagged edges and snake venom now. “If you ever touch me again, I am going to cut out your eye and feed you it. Do you understand?”

  Navtej tried to move his lips, but they only quivered uselessly in terror.

  “I said, do you understand?!” The king growled.

  “I…I understand, I understand!” Navtej croaked out, he could hear himself sobbing, feel the warmth of tears run down his skin. His heart was racing, he was scared, so, so scared. “I’m s…sorry.”

  “Good,” the King chirped, and Navtej could hear him smile. It was gone when he continued however, and a hate like never before coated his tongue now. “Your Father slaughtered mine like an animal. Think very hard about what I am willing to do to his son.”

  The King held him there for a long few seconds, and Navtej only sank further into terror. When he was certain, beyond any possible doubt that the King really was going to slit his throat open right then and there, the boy let go and shoved Navtej’s face into the mud.

  Navtej stayed there in the dirt, curled up, hugging himself tight and sobbing. He felt a warmth between his legs—he’d wet himself. He didn’t care. He just sobbed some more.

  ###

  When I find that cunt of a King, I am going to fucking kill him, Sasha decided.

  She checked the closet, the kitchen, the toilets, the everything. King Exia Vanfoster was nowhere to be found. He’d just upped and disappeared from the Governor's manor the moment she’d turned her back to him.

  She stepped into a room and found herself in a library. The King was not there, Navtej Volkov, however, was—rimmed glasses on, sat down by desk, and reading a book. He looked up at her intrusion and smiled kindly. “Captain Sasha,” he greeted.

  “Sorry, I’m just looking for—”

  —”Exi?” the man said with a knowing smile.

  Sasha winced. “Yes, he just vanished, poof, I’ve searched everywhere for him.”

  Navtej laughed. “Yes, he, uh, does that a lot actually—just runs off and does his own thing.” His eyes were suddenly wistful. “Morozova used to say, ‘I’d look one way, and then the little prick would be gone. It does my fucking head in.’”

  Sasha smiled at that despite herself. “How are you even friends with him? I mean, you’re a good person and he’s just so…”

  “Evil?” Navtej grinned with knowing eyes.

  “Well, no, but—I mean, yes.” Sasha sighed. She had to admit he was better in some ways than she had initially thought, but also worse—much, much worse. Sasha often found herself questioning just how bad of a person he was, but never the fact that he was, in fact, a bad one. She found a chair and sat in it.

  Navtej took a deep breath before speaking. “Morozova once told me, Exia brings out the worst in me. And I, the best in him. I think in a sense that applies to most people he’s close to.”

  Well, he’s certainly bringing out the worst in me, Sasha thought. “Must have been hard—growing up with him,” she asked.

  Navtej drummed his fingers against the desk. “Kid Exia was…” he seemed to be searching for the best words to use, and Sasha saw him give up a moment later, “a prick really, horrible little bastard, if I saw him now, I think I’d punch him in the throat and shove him down a flight of stairs.”

  Sasha found herself laughing at that.

  “But, I’m not all perfect, Captain Sasha,” Navtej added, chuckles dying down. “After all, how many sons of Generals do you see becoming mercenaries.”

  He stressed the word she’d used, and that made Sasha flush with embarrassment. She wanted to change the topic, it would have been proper to. But she couldn’t deny her curiosity. “How does that happen by the way? And I’m not just asking because I thought needing glasses marked you out of being a Mage.”

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  “They’re my Papa’s glasses,” he clarified. “I just wear them because it reminds me of him.” He reached into his jacket, and brought out a necklace with a fang chapped pendant hanging from it—one with curious symbols along its edges. “And I’m not a Mage. I’m a Shifter.”

  Shifter…

  While Sasha had never seen their Disciples in action, she’d heard tales of them on the battlefield—roaring, monstrous beasts who left only death and destruction in their wake.

  Sasha didn’t notice herself inch away from the necklace. But Navtej did.

  “I’m not going to hex you or anything,” he told her playfully, but she could see a hint of hurt in his eyes—the kind that came from a man well used to it.

  The kind she felt every time a man paused before saluting her.

  “Sorry,” she said quickly, feeling horrible.

  Navtej smiled. “It’s okay,” he assured her, then moved on. “But yes, to answer your question, I would say the way the son of a General becomes a Watchman is through a lot of mistakes and regrets,” he told her with a melancholy to his tongue. “But if I were to expand a little, I would say I grew tired of being a soldier; I grew tired of killing. That was my father’s passion, not mine. So now I protect people.”

  Sasha found herself defensive at that. “Being a soldier isn’t all about killing,” she replied with a tone perhaps rather too sharp.

  Navtej shrugged, even-tempered as ever. “It was all I did,” he told her. “Perhaps that says more about me than the uniform,” he admitted, and Sasha saw sorrow in his eyes.

  Sasha didn’t know what to do with that, she didn’t know if she should do anything with that. So she didn’t. She nodded, took in a breath, and looked to the door. “I should go find the King.”

  “Good luck,” the man wished her.

  Sasha was on her feet within moments, and heading for the door the next. She stopped at the exit and set her eyes back on the man. Sasha smiled as she spoke. “He’s not all bad, I suppose, I think you’re right about that.”

  ###

  Exia twisted the man’s head off and watched as the blood fountained from his neck and dyed the ceiling red.

  Oh, neat.

  “You fuck!” His friend—brother—lover—whatever came at him with both hands gloved and fire spitting from them.

  Exia weathered the flames, feeling them redden rather than blacken his skin, then walked up to the man and set his face ablaze. Judging by the way the Mage screamed, the dying man did not like that one bit.

  He was in a warehouse, home to the Black Snow—the most powerful gang in Znaniye, known for their love of under-the-table arms dealerships and the occasional rival-lynching.

  It was the arms dealing that concerned Exia the most today, and when he had knocked on their door to politely ask if they had recently sold any trinitrotoluene to any Royalist Militants, they had replied by shooting him in the face. Rude.

  Luckily he’d had gloves on so the bullet pricked—it had been an armour-piercing round—and what he did to the man who’d shot him was more than a prick.

  Naturally, the whole affair devolved into chaos quite quickly, and now Exia was facing down a dozen or so Mages, all with their gloves pointed at him. That was quite a nasty surprise, and would probably have been the death of any normal Republic Mage sent to investigate. He found it really funny that they’d ended up with him on their doorstep instead.

  “An Abyssal Mage?” One of the men whispered, as if saying the name might summon Zcigmagus himself into the warehouse. “How?”

  His friends did not look particularly eager to continue fighting after that realization, in fact, many of them were flicking gazes over to the exit.

  “Doesn’t matter how,” another said, huge and with the look of a man who’d seen a good many others die. He was the leading man here, so he would be the one Exia would question. “We’re twelve. He’s one.” he held Exia’s eyes. “Stream!”

  A jet of pressurised air shot at Exia, and then a cacophony of other magic joined the fray.

  Zcigmagus hungered for death. And Exia fed him.

  He dodged the attacks he could and took the ones he couldn’t. Compared to the Priests from Gorodlzhi, this lot’s attacks felt like the blows of tantruming children. It helped that Exia had grown somewhat stronger from killing the four Mages, but in truth they were just several calibres below what he’d faced back then.

  His blue limb wrapped around a man’s head and Exia used him as a battering ram to slam into a group of his allies.

  Chase!

  A blue fiery wolf exploded into the air and leapt on a man—covering him in azure death.

  Fracture!

  He extended a tentacle outward, it solidified, and then exploded into a million sharp crystals—all cutting open flesh and biting deep into skin.

  More Mages came at Exia, and more Mages died at his hands. The real challenge was in finding new, interesting, and creative ways to kill the ones that tried.

  He ripped one’s leg off in a spray of gore and used it to beat his friend to death. Three out of ten.

  He shoved a tentacle into a Mage’s mouth and down his throat. Fracture. The man’s head stopped being biology and became physics—exploding into a cloud of pink mist and leaving a neckless corpse in its wake. Six out of ten.

  He picked up a man and—wait, they were running away now. That was somewhat disappointing—if expected. The more pressing concern was that the leader was also attempting to join them in the escape.

  No, no, we can’t have that, now can we?

  His limb shot forward, snatched the man by the ankle, and flung him high into the air. The man flew, screaming in a wide arc before crashing to the ground right in front of Exia—bouncing on impact and kicking up a wave of dust as he hit the earth. A potential seven out of ten, if only he’d died.

  He looked up at Exia with bleary eyes.

  “Hello,” Exia gave a friendly wave. “I have some questions for you.”

  The man scrambled back, only stopping when his back slammed into the wall behind him. Fear was etched into his face, true fear, the kind people wore when they saw not enemies, but monsters. “Listen, I don’t want no trouble, I understand this was alls a misunderstanding, and if you let me go, I promise you, on Zcigmagus himself, I’ll consider it forgotten,” his words came quickly, as if sprayed out of a hose.

  “I need to know about any recent dealings in trinitrotoluene you may have had,” Exia told him. “We’re thinking of a perhaps elusive client—didn’t show his face, likely communicated with you purely through a middleman.”

  The man thought and luckily for him, something in Exia’s words seemed to ring a bell. “Yes, been a while ago now, got an order for a shit ton of TNT.”

  “How much?” He asked.

  The man hesitated and then decided that breaking client confidentiality was the least of his concerns right now. “Two kilograms.”

  Two Kilograms…Exia hummed and began thinking aloud. “So we’re looking at a small to medium sized building, perhaps two stories large. Well that’s disappointing, I thought it’d be a larger target.” Nav did as well, and it was quite rare that both of them would be wrong about the same thing.

  “Well, it likely is…” The arms dealer blurted out.

  Exia turned to him, frowned, and saw the man flinch in terror. “Well, I suppose if your client is an idiot, he might try to use two kilograms to blow up a large building.”

  “Suppose you’re right…” He said, quickly, nodding. Far too quickly.

  Exia narrowed his eyes. “No, you know something I don’t. Speak.”

  He spoke hesitantly. “Shaped charges?”

  “Shaped what?” Exia asked.

  “Weapons-grade geometry, I call it,” the man said, almost looking proud now. “You take a dense cone, pack it with TNT, and set the detonator at the base. The blast don’t go out in every direction like a firework—it all gets funneled into a single point. Like punching with a knife.”

  Exia stared, stunned beyond words for a while. “Fuck me, that’s brilliant.”

  “Th-thank you, came up with it meself,” he nervously replied.

  Exia didn’t answer; his thoughts were already moving, recalculating. Suddenly, two kilograms didn’t seem so small anymore. “With that, you could bring down something as large as…a museum?”

  “Aye, sounds about right,” the man agreed.

  Exia grinned ear to ear. There was only one museum in Znaniye he would hit if he were a Royalist assassin, and that would be the Volkhaem archives—the only museum in this city dedicated to celebrating the revolution, and named after one of the two men who oversaw it.

  Oh, this was good—very good. Exia rushed towards the door, he couldn’t wait to see Nav’s big stupid face when he told him he’d figured it out before he did. He stopped, turned to the arms dealer and hummed. “If I find out you’re lying to me, I’m going to come back here and splatter your glorious brain all over the wall.

  The man swallowed, paled, and Exia left.