Chapter 366 — What He Saw on the Spirit Plains
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
The drowsy soldier came wide awake at once. He took the papers briskly and greeted him with a good deal of zeal: "The holy light shelter you, Reverend. You needn't have queued, you know."
It was a little odd that the priest's robe should look so worn, but a priest was a priest: a transcendent, a man of standing, and one of the Mingyao Church, which stood in the ascendant these days. He certainly did not dare be negligent.
"Everyone's queuing," Wright said with a mild smile, adding casually, "So many people. In my memory this place was never this crowded on an ordinary day."
"Ha, that was last year. This year's different," the soldier said, shaking his head. "A whole crowd of merchants have got into the potion trade between the Spirit Plains and the Southern Marches, and then there's plenty of ruined farmers who've heard some fool's tale or other and are running south to make a living. Lots of merchants carry passes signed by the Grand Duke and do nothing but haul these people south. See those covered wagons with three bundles of straw hanging off them? Those are the ones. They're bound for the Whitewater River wharf..."
Wright blinked, stirred a little inside: even here, what the lord was doing had such reach?
As they talked, the soldier finished checking Wright's clerical certificate and caught sight of the seal on the travel permit beneath it. He broke off mid-sentence, his expression turning odd: "Another certificate from Duke Cecil..."
Wright asked curiously, "Why? Is something wrong?"
"...Oh, no, of course not, it's the Duke's seal, there can't be anything wrong," the soldier said hurriedly, then added with some awkwardness, "It's just that lately half the permits I see every day carry the Cecil emblem..."
"A frontier territory always needs hands and supplies," Wright said unhurriedly. "It's only that no new frontier has been opened in so many years that people have likely forgotten such things."
"Doesn't matter to us anyway," the soldier muttered, handing the checked documents back to Wright. "You can go in, Reverend."
Wright took the papers, tucked them close to his body, turned, and walked toward that heavy gate he remembered so well, sheathed in black steel and banded with copper.
Through the deep gate, through the fortress's stout first and second walls, lay the inner city of Stonehold.
As a vast bastion, Stonehold was not merely a military structure; it was the most important barrier and customs point between the Southern Marches and the Spirit Plains, and a place where traveling merchants stopped, gathered, and dispersed. To serve those functions, and to keep nearly ten thousand soldiers, knights, and mages provisioned, the fortress's interior was in truth a fully equipped, bustling city.
Xuanyao City had not changed at all.
Wright walked the streets of Stonehold, and the pictures in his memory that had grown a little blurred sharpened again before these familiar sights. He saw the pastry shop he had loved best as a child; on the days each month when he came to make his "deliveries" he had eight coppers of pocket money, just enough for a cheap cake or a sweet biscuit. He saw the greasy "butcher's square," and the tall wooden frame standing at its edge. He remembered that the frame was meant for flogging thieves and deserters, though since the Southern Marches had known no war for so long and soldiering in the fortress was a thoroughly comfortable post, its chief use was flogging thieves.
Nearly every month some thief would be strung up on the frame with his hands bound and whipped till his flesh split open, and the greatest amusement of the townsfolk and many of the soldiers was to come to the "butcher's square" and watch. Wright also remembered that on the second rest day of the Fire Month each year the fortress city held a celebration of its founding, and the centerpiece of it was to bind the first thief caught in the Fire Month to that frame and whip him for an hour.