Chapter 612 — The Restless Kingdom
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The sky was overcast, and a restless wind blew in from the plains, carrying the last stubborn remnants of the cold into the city. Beneath that dim, wan light, Count Pompey stood on the terrace of his family's castle, his mood darker still than the heavens above.
More and more rumors were circulating between city and countryside, and their content was deeply unsettling. Some said a terrible plague had broken out in the Greatwood Pass region; others claimed that the King** had already suffered a crushing defeat, that important cities and strongholds had fallen one after another. A chaos of reports flew in every direction—and even a nobleman like the Count could obtain no reliable intelligence from the north. That, more than anything, was what made it so alarming.
The terrace offered a broad view, commanding the whole city and the vast plains beyond its walls. Slightly portly, Count Pompey wore a warm, heavy coat and leaned on a walking stick, gazing into the distance through the cold wind. His eyes first swept across the hills and woods to the north—not long ago, a curious company had passed along the edge of his domain, emerging from Boulder Fortress and heading north. Led by an elven ranger, riding strange magical vehicles and carrying outlandish equipment, they had disclosed neither their mission nor their destination, but they bore a travel permit signed by Duke Gao Yang Cecil.
Count Pompey had not dared to stop them.
But from the disciplined bearing of that company and the direction of their march, the Count could easily guess that their movements were perhaps connected to the shifting situation in the north of late.
His gaze traveled along the hills and plains until the glittering waters of the Dolgun River came into view, and beyond it the rolling mountains and, among them, the hazy outline of Boulder Fortress. That towering stronghold was still shrouded in a dense magical barrier; mountain and wall together sealed off every line of sight that might pry southward.
Ever since the Cecil family had taken the Southern Marches back into its hands, that land had shut its gates—its physical "gates," to be sure, still opened from time to time, and one city of Boulder even remained open to visitors, but in the symbolic sense, the Southern Marches' "gates" had been closed from the end of the Unification War right up to this day.
The surveillance and control system the kingdom had spent a century building had been uprooted and severed at a stroke. No one now knew what that founding duke, returned from the dead, was brewing in his realm, nor what changes had been taking place in that land over the past two years. People could only guess from the wild, fantastic tales carried out by merchants and adventurers, and from the glimpses caught in the city of Boulder. And apart from speculating about the customs and life of the Southern Marches, another focus of the curious was the gate of Boulder Fortress—when would that gate open, and under what circumstances?
It was, perhaps, a puzzle even harder to solve than the current situation in the north.
Perhaps when that gate finally opened, his own tenure as the "Count on the Ground" would be over as well.
Adjacent to Boulder Fortress, with his entire household within range of its cannon, lacking the Crown's support, having lost almost all his troops in the last Southern Marches war, and with the economic lifeline of his domain firmly in the grip of Cecil merchants, Count Pompey had endured this agonizing situation for a long time—and by now he had learned to take it philosophically.
He was gazing somewhat absently toward Boulder Fortress; his superhuman eyesight let him make out the stronghold and the mouth of the Dolgun River even without the aid of Hawkeye. And in that absent gazing, he suddenly saw something that shook him to his core. At first he thought his eyes were deceiving him, but soon, through Hawkeye, he confirmed beyond all doubt what he was seeing.