Nights of Villjamur - Mark Charan Newton [16]
The commander sat at the foot of the tower, his knees pulled up, back resting against the stone. His saber remained unsheathed at his side. Stars now defined the hills surrounding the fjord, and he concentrated on sounds, the way you always did on these shifts, hoping and yet not hoping to hear footsteps, maybe snapping branches, someone coming their way. But there was little activity apart from that of nocturnal birds and mammals, every one of their eerie calls reminding him how they were quite alone.
In fact, he began to feel he was barely there himself.
CHAPTER 3
THE HARDEST CYNIC, INVESTIGATOR RUMEX JERYD THOUGHT, is often fundamentally the most romantic person, because he so often feels let down by the world. He couldn’t detect much romance in himself today, but all the cynicism he could wish for.
He could hear the rain driving against the old stone walls. He liked the sound: it reminded him of the outside world. Lately, he’d spent far too many days in this gloom, had begun to feel a little too disconnected from Villjamur. Everything the city stood for these days was something he found a struggle to perceive.
The rumel looked down at the returned theater tickets in his right hand, then his gaze switched to the note in his left hand.
It read: Thanks, but it’s just all a bit too late, don’t you think? Marysa x
Jeryd sighed, his tail twitched. It was from his ex-wife. They were a rumel couple, and had been together for over a hundred years. There were benefits in not being human. Not only was rumel skin tougher, but because of their longevity they could take time with things, have some patience. As a rumel you never ended up running around frantically after matters. You let them come to you. However, it made his being away from Marysa all the more painful, because it was as if he’d lost half his life along with her.
He folded up the paper, placed it and the tickets in the drawer of his desk. He would have to find someone else to take to the production. Or not go at all, just forget about it.
The Freeze was going to be cold enough without spending it alone. He sighed.
She’d hinted she was going to leave him, before that final day, but that was during one of the months of fighting between groups of the newly arriving refugees and Villjamur’s far-right protesters, so a period where nothing really registered in his mind. The Inquisition had hauled in and executed several men—all disillusioned ex-soldiers of the Regiment of Foot—just to set an example, and it was known secretly that the soldiers were sympathizers with these extremists.
But it all meant Jeryd had been ignoring Marysa.
She liked antiques. In a city as old as this there was a plentiful supply. Sometimes, she told him, she hoped she would find a grand relic, one that the cultists had overlooked, maybe make a fortune with it. But Jeryd had his head in the real world, or so he said. It was only his job, after all. He brought home the trauma of these ancient streets, carried it as his own burden. Keeping order in a city of over four hundred thousand individuals was partly his responsibility, and when he came home there she was: parading some new item around the house, telling him eagerly about what its history might have been, researching it in those pointless books she purchased. A luxury! The Jamur society was the latest in an endless line of civilizations, and each had left their own funk and detritus. Of course, the cultists would have long claimed anything useful from the Dawnir remains. All that was left now was a hint that things were once greater—that life in Villjamur today was more primitive and less civilized than life under those ancient societies, the Qintans, the Azimuths, despite