Chapter 4 (Part I): Well, This Stinks

My dad knew a guy who worked with someone who was part of the wall repairs around the King’s Lake reservoir. You wouldn’t believe what he said happened to one of the guys who was there before him…

-        My cousin Elise, when I was eight years old, explaining why I shouldn’t swim in King’s Lake.

Vinny didn’t see Vidi or Kaira on his ride into Kingstown. He had taken a more backward path to be cautious, and as he scouted about the outlying area he decided that was a wise move. He had discretely negotiated a room in a tavern outside Kingstown just so he could spend an evening listening to the traders going in and out of the city and get an idea of where things stood.

Rumors of the altercation in the market had circulated widely, with quite a lot of inconsistency. Most people had now heard that the dragon had foiled a 'Gnoman terrorist plot,' which was an all but worst-case scenario for Vinny. Besides making his job more difficult, the fact that his people were now being implicated in subversive action against a foreign power meant he had seriously cocked up his mission.

Everyone had also heard that Syliva was being praised as the hero of the hour. That’s not to say that very many of them actually did praise her, but that was what they had heard. Everyone seemed to have the impression that everyone else approved of her actions. There was one herald that had, surprisingly, gone hard against the others. They didn’t levy any accusations but simply provided an impartial, all but sterile account of the confrontation in the marketplace, based on eye-witness reports, and even an anonymous interview with one of the guards that had been involved. The conversation between Azraea and Syliva had been related almost word for word, as had the part where Syliva had flown off in a tantrum without actually doing anything decisive, let alone heroic.

Despite being a major herald, it had been largely drowned out by their competitors, who all began carrying stories about how Syliva had declared the dissenting herald to be a source of misinformation. Calling them stories was an overstatement too. The only story was that the dragon had said it. There was no supporting investigation or analysis, just wall to wall reports on what the dragon said, and she had started saying some pretty aggressive things. She was now going so far as to call the unsupportive herald an “enemy of the people”. That phrase chilled Vinny. He had heard it before - on one occasion he’d even been the one to personally interject it into a volatile political situation - and it was almost always a precursor to violence and anarchy.

Vinny was definitely off-mission now. Fortunately, the Empress understood that infiltration and manipulation wasn’t an exact science, so the fact that things had gone pear-shaped might still be forgiven if things played out in the Empire’s favor. At minimum, he at least had Meingen's weapon and research as a prize. He'd spent one night behind closed doors in a tavern studying the impressively detailed notes, committing them to memory as best he could, and figuring out how to arm the weapon. 
As much as Meingen's plan to blow up the city to kill the dragon appalled Vinny, Vinny also recognized that if Syliva forayed south of Caelia's border thousands of Gnomans would die before the Empire could devise and implement a plan to kill her on the wing. Vinny was privy to many details of Gnoman history that were generally kept under wraps, and knew that Syliva wasn't the first dragon the Empire had dealt with. Unfortunately, the poor sod they'd encountered before had been a fairly well meaning fellow that the Gnomans had taken down through manipulation and betrayal so cruel that the story even left Vinny with a bad taste in his mouth. 
There was no chance that Syliva could be defeated through that sort of basic duplicity, so Vinny had reluctantly decided that Meingen's weapon was his backup plan. He had completed the weapon and then stashed it in one of their team's dead-drops, sans a key piece of the precisely machined trigger mechanism. With that done, he'd sent copies of the notes to his homeland by secure (albeit slow) channels. Ochsner had been shaken by the device’s destructive potential, and feared its power so greatly that Vinny could imagine her walking a thousand miles to pitch it and every shred of information about it into a volcano. Vinny felt much the same, but reasoned that if it could be invented once, it could be invented again. Eventually, every nation would have such weapons, and if that was a possibility, the empire needed to have them first.

With the weapon dealt with, Vinny's next priority was getting into Kingstown and rendezvousing with his asset before she decided she was tired of waiting and started doing things herself. He was pleased that her self-confidence seemed to have risen to match her competence, but like any local asset employed in an operation like this, the stronger she became the harder she was to manage. Vinny would have loved to simply let her go and see what she accomplished on her own, but the Gnomans now had too much at stake for him to simply take a seat in the audience.

Unfortunately, getting into the city was problematic. The guards were scrutinizing Gnomans carefully, requiring proof of citizenship and subjecting them to intense questioning. Of course, Vinny had the documentation; no agent provocateur worth his salt would embed in a foreign country without the papers to support any of three different identities. The only people the 'enhanced security measures' would inconvenience would be absent minded traders, undocumented farm workers, and native-born Gnoman descendants who’d never had a reason to carry identifying documents with them.       

No, papers weren’t a problem, but questions were. Thanks to Syliva personally taking control of the investigation, her privately recruited guardsmen now held the power to ‘legitimately’ shakedown any Gnoman that crossed their path. Vinny could play his best game, but even if he gave all the right, most convincing answers, there would be no guarantee he would walk out of an interrogation with his belongings, if at all. Carrying a vital and practically irreplaceable piece of an arcane super weapon on his person, Vinny wanted to avoid that. Fortunately, thanks to a little study of history, he knew a way into the city that most were unaware of. It was dodgy and unpleasant, but it would suffice this once.

Vinny left the tavern via a window in his room at about midnight. and slipped down to Mudville’s docks where he stole a small row boat. It was hard to find one small enough to suit and he had no doubt that the vessel he found must have belonged to a kinsman; either that or someone had taken up canoeing.

Given his small size, rowing across the lake was taxing, especially with the current that pulled everything to the lake’s outflow through the Old Wall to the south. He made it across, though, and found himself at Kingstown’s outer wall. The water ran right up to it, with no bank. Now came the brilliant but risky part.

It was well known that two hundred years ago Caelus IV, seeking a confrontation with Syliva, had snuck back into his own castle via a secret passage. It was also generally accepted that the “secret passage” was probably just a drainage culvert that emptied Kingstown’s sewage. Such a thing would be necessary, since otherwise the high walls of Kingstown would make it a giant, filthy soup bowl.

What most people didn’t realize, though, is that back then the Old Wall hadn’t extended across the Gykien River. The dwarves who had built the Old Wall after rebelling against the Feguncians had originally placed a bridge-like fortress with a massive gate at the river entrance. That fortress had survived the elves' subsequent invasion of Caelia, but had finally been toppled when human and orc rebels led by Caelus I deposed the elves. The dwarven fortress had been so massive that its collapse had partially blocked the river, flooding the land upstream. The debris had finally been cleared away during the reign of Caelus I's grandson but - ironically - it didn't take long for the people of central Caelia to begin lamenting the loss of the accidentally created reservoir. Besides providing for some good fishing, it had helped the local farms survive a nasty drought in the last year before it was drained.
During Caelus IV’s time, the kingdom had begun construction on a dam to recreate the conditions following the collapse of the fortress. It was a contentious decision at the time not only because it was costly and displaced some of the area's farmers, but because of the impact it would have on trade and diplomacy with the lands down river. To account for that, Caelus IV had also intended to construct a series of locks that would have allowed merchant ships to bypass the dam. Although the dam was completed after his untimely death, the locks were left only half-finished. As a result, Caelus IV's attempt to appease the conflicting interests of his kingdom had generally done more harm than good; an unfortunate legacy for the king.

For Vinny, this convoluted history all had one important implication – when Caelus had broken into his own castle two centuries earlier, the lake hadn’t been reformed yet, meaning that the reason no one had found the drainage culvert since then was likely because it was underwater now. Somewhere beneath Vinny there was a submerged entrance into the capitol that hadn't been used for 200 years.

Unfortunately, his guess at the culvert’s location was imprecise, and it seemed that the culvert was hidden even in the driest of years, meaning that, in a wet year like this, the culvert would be very far down. And of course, even assuming it wasn’t buried in sediment or covered by rusted iron bars, however far down he swam, he’d have to swim back up at least as far, and that swim would be through a dark, mysterious pipe. It would be an impossible feat for an average human, but for a Gnoman spy, well, it was all in a day’s work. When strength of body failed a covert agent of the Gnoman Empire, he or she could always fall back on the innovation and ridiculously large budget of the Sinister Legion’s quartermastery branch.

Vinny packed his boots into his travel sack, and bundled it up with his cloak as tightly as possible. Satisfied that the backpack would be as out of the way as possible, he finally donned his ace-in-the-hole, a thin, suffocatingly tight hood. The fabric clung to his face, plunging him into darkness and completely cutting off his air. Scrambling about for a heavy rock he’d put in the boat, he grabbed a hold of it and fell backwards off the boat.

As soon as the water hit the tight fitted hood, its enchantment kicked in. The total blackness Vinny had been in was replaced with a dim red vision of the rock clutched in his hands, and the alchemical enchantment in the cloth transformed the water that flowed through it into breathable air. It was uncomfortable – it felt like having a wet towel plastered to his face – but it worked. He could breathe nearly unhindered, and as he neared the bottom he could make out plants on the lake’s floor, and he could see the stone wall extending right down into the sediment.

Alarmingly, that wasn’t all he saw – directly beneath him a vague shape, at least seven feet long, kicked up a cloud of dirt and sand. At first Vinny thought it was a shark, but he soon realized it was a catfish. Even at its considerable size, it probably wouldn’t have been a threat to a human being, but for the three foot tall Gnoman, it was a real predator.

Vinny’s gut tightened – he had only a moment before he’d land right on the beast, and he had no idea how many more there were hanging around in the darkness. He really had only one option – hit it hard enough to scare the daylights out of it.

He plunged through the cloud of silt, and felt the rock land on the scaly beast with a soft thud. The creature thrashed about, startled and annoyed, but as it turned about on Vinny, he slipped the blade out of his sleeve and took a swipe at its face. The razor sharp blade sliced into one of the long thin barbels extending from around its mouth. He cut deep into the sensitive tendril and that was evidently enough for the catfish – it bolted away with a surge of its tail, kicking up a violent cloud of dissolved mud.

Vinny searched around looking to see if there were any other challengers and, indeed, he could see some vague forms in the red glow of his hood. They were closing in cautiously, circling. Vinny guessed they’d probably been kept at a distance by the big fellow who’d been squatting here, and were now even more wary of whatever small thing could send their rival off in an instinctual panic.

But was it Vinny they were interested in, or something else? The air flowing through the hood smelled foul but that wasn’t especially unusual for a lake bottom. There was an exceptional amount of growth here, though – stones were covered in thick algae and some sort of shellfish. Vinny moved carefully, trying to avoid kicking up more filth, and then found what he’d been hoping for – the culvert in the wall.

The bad news was that the sewer pipe was mostly filled with sediment – the good news was that it left just enough space for Vinny’s small body to squeeze through. He quickly took off his pack, tied it to a short length of rope, and swam down into the pipe. Between the ceiling of the pipe and the collected sediment, Vinny barely had enough space to breathe, and thanks to the curve of the pipe's ceiling, his arms and legs were badly restricted. More than anything he might encounter, this put his training to the test. He remembered the days packed into tight hot boxes, barbaric torture chambers imperial agents willingly endured to prepare them for interrogations and inhospitable conditions. The key was always to remember, ‘this too shall pass’ and to take the time to figure out the fastest way to make that happen. After testing his range of motion, Vinny reached forward with both hands, and put all of his effort into short but consistent little kicks that propelled him slowly but steadily against the current flowing down the pipe.

Unfortunately, the hood he was wearing wouldn’t last forever. Eventually the magical solution that converted the water to air would wash out, but after sometime in the long pipe, he lost his sense of time and couldn’t guess how much longer it might last. The other problem was if he hit a blockage now he was pretty sure he physically couldn’t turn around, even if the mask would last long enough for him to swim back. Vinny wasn’t the sort who liked taking chances, but risks were an inevitable part of the job – at a certain point, no amount of preparation could get you past having to make a gamble. Still, despite his apprehension, Vinny knew that the pipe should be angling upward, and with the consistent flow outward, there should be less and less sediment backing it up the further he went.

Indeed, that proved to be the case. As the moments dragged by, he found himself with more and more room, and found himself fighting less and less of a current. Eventually, he was swimming freely down a pipe large enough for an armored man to crawl through, as Caelus and his knights must have 200 years ago.

The pipe exited into a larger chamber a moment after breathing started to become difficult. Vinny pulled his things out of the pipe, making sure they weren’t tangled, and he swam hard upward. The hood still provided the faint red vision he’d relied upon, but initially there wasn’t much to see. Finally, he spotted a submerged stair case winding up the inside of the round stone chamber, and though it didn’t promise anything, that felt somehow encouraging. Vinny took one last gulp of air through the failing mask, and with a final push, swam upward as quickly as possible. At last, he felt his fingertips, then his hands, and then his head break the surface. He pulled the bottom of the hood up to uncover his nose and mouth, and took a deep breath. It was foul, but it was air.

He scanned his surroundings – it was a large round room with a domed ceiling. Vinny was impressed – it rivaled Gnoman stone work and architecture. It obviously wasn’t supposed to be this full, doubtless flooded as a result of the lake’s creation, but there was still plenty of air in the chamber, and many of the stone tunnels leading into the room had enough head room for Vinny to travel through without holding his breath.

At first, Vinny figured he’d be walking out by trial and error, but then he noticed that the top of the round room had a massive relief – a compass symbol was set into the ceiling indicating North, South, East, and West. Vinny swam over and climbed up into the northernmost tunnel, and set out following it under the city.    

Vinny came up to a tunnel running just beneath the stone street near dawn, and he heard a horrific noise coming down through the drainage grates above him. There were angry shouts and chants; another protest was happening, and Vinny wondered if it wouldn’t end up just like the one outside the college. He made his way to a partially broken grate, pulled himself up to it, and squeezed through the remaining bars onto the street about half a block from the noise.

The crowd was chanting, “Free the heralds!” over and over again. Vinny wondered if that demand was literal or figurative, but either way it seemed like a bad portent. He backed off the street into an alley to watch a little bit longer. There were some guards in armor with shields and clubs, but they were horrifically outnumbered. Fortunately, the crowd seemed surprisingly disciplined. Outside of being loud at an extremely early hour, they were exercising great restraint.

They were, though, oblivious to something that Vinny saw right away – hooded figures came out of alleyways near the crowd. They were garbed in generally nondescript brown tunics and tan trousers, with their faces obscured by scarves under their hoods. Their identities were effectively concealed, and when anonymous protesters show up to a peaceful demonstration it’s a safe bet they don’t intend to keep it peaceful. The first window broke only seconds after they blended into the crowd, then another, and then a street sign came down. A rock from the middle of the crowd struck a guard, so the guards reacted by assaulting the protesters nearest them, including one woman who’d stopped to see if the guard who’d been hit was okay. The crowd reacted to the attack defensively, and within moments the peaceful protest had turned into an angry mob.

  Vinny wondered which side the anonymous protesters were actually on. This sort of thing was the epitome of what it meant to be an agent provocateur, and Vinny had been on both sides of that game. Vinny had destroyed foreign rivals by emboldening anti-establishment groups, but he’d also eliminated internal threats to Gnoman allies by discrediting them and giving the establishment a reason to ‘deal’ with them. The hoods and scarves were so obvious Vinny couldn’t help but see what was happening as “amateur hour” but it seemed to be enough to get the job done. A few minutes after the protest turned violent, the clatter of armored boots rounded the corner at the end of the block; there was no way that the guard could respond so quickly to the change in circumstances – they had to already be on their way down before the protest turned violent. As if on cue, the hooded figures wormed their way back out of the anarchic crowd and disappeared down the alleys, leaving the rest of the townspeople to suffer the brunt of the guard’s violence.

Vinny would have liked to have caught up to one of the rabble rousers and extracted some information, but there was no way to get across the street with the rioters turning to face the approaching guardsmen. Vinny disappeared down his alley and made his way to Vidi’s safe house.