• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 471 0

’s name. ‘Nax’s father was a decent king,’ he said. ‘And Cansrel’s father was a valuable monster adviser to him. But, darling, Nax and Cansrel were two other creatures entirely. Nax didn’t inherit his father’s strength, and you know as well as anyone that Cansrel didn’t inherit even a touch of his father’s empathy. And they grew up together as boys, so when Nax took the throne, he’d already had Cansrel living inside his head his whole life. Oh, Nax had a good heart, I’m sure of it - sometimes I saw it - but it didn’t matter, because he was also just the smallest bit lazy, the smallest bit too willing to let someone else do his thinking - and that was all the opening Cansrel ever needed. Nax never had a chance,’ Brocker said, shaking his head, squinting at memories. ‘From the start, Cansrel used Nax to get everything he wanted, and all Cansrel ever wanted was his own pleasure. It was inevitable, sweetheart,’ he said, bringing his attention back to her face. ‘As long as they lived, Cansrel and Nax were always going to lead the kingdom to ruin.’

Ruin. Fire knew, for Brocker had told her, the progressive steps that had led to ruin once young Nax had taken the throne. It had started with women and parties, and that hadn’t been so bad, for Nax had fallen in love with a black-haired lady from the northern Dells named Roen and married her. King Nax and Queen Roen had produced a son, a handsome, dark boy named Nash, and even with a somewhat neglectful king at its helm the kingdom had had an aura of stability.

Except that Cansrel had been bored. His gratification had always required excess, and now he began to need more women and more parties, and wine, and children from the court to alleviate the monotony of the women. And drugs. Nax had agreed to it all; Nax had been like a shell to hold Cansrel’s mind and nod its head yes to whatever Cansrel said was best.

‘Yet, you’ve told me that ultimately it was the drugs that destroyed Nax,’ Fire said. ‘Could Nax have held on if it hadn’t been for the drugs?’

‘Perhaps,’ Brocker said lightly. ‘Cansrel could always keep hold of himself with poison in his veins, blast him, but Nax couldn’t; it made him high-strung, and paranoid, and uncontrolled, and more vindictive than he’d ever been before.’

He stopped at that, staring bleakly at his own useless legs. Fire kept her feeling tight within herself so that he would not be flooded with her curiosity. Or her pity; her pity must never touch him.

A moment later he looked up and held her eyes again. He smiled very slightly. ‘Perhaps it would be fair to say that Nax mightn’t have turned into a madman if it weren’t for the drugs. But I believe the drugs were as inevitable as the rest. And Cansrel himself was the truest drug to Nax’s mind. People saw what was happening - they saw Nax punishing law-abiding men and making alliances with criminals and wasting all the money in the king’s coffers. Allies of Nax’s father began to withdraw their support for Nax, as they were bound to do. And ambitious fellows like Mydogg and Gentian began to think and plot, and train squadrons of soldiers, under the guise of self-defence. And who could blame a mountain lord for that, with things so unstable? There was no law anymore, not outside the city, for Nax couldn’t be troubled to attend to it. The roads were no longer safe, you had to be mad or desperate to travel the underground routes, looters and raiders and black market thugs were cropping up everywhere. Even the Pikkians. For ages, they’d been content to squabble among themselves. Now, suddenly, even they couldn’t resist taking advantage of our lawlessness.’

Fire knew all of this; she knew her own history. In the end, a kingdom connected by underground tunnels and riddled with caves and hidden mountain holdings could not bear so much volatility. There were too many places for bad things to hide.

Wars had broken out in the Dells; not proper wars with well-defined political adversaries, but bungling mountain turf wars, one neighbour against another, one party of cave raiders against some poor lord’s holding,