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“Ezekiel Polyon.  I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.  Don’t know if you’ve heard–you have a reputation among the sailors now.”

“The…sailors?”

“The navy.  Ever since we broke the Saltstill Cabal’s blockade two weeks ago.  While we were fending off their reinforcements, somehow the fucking city guard repelled their primary invasion force at the Fisher’s docks and didn’t give a fucking inch.  We got outmaneuvered plain and simple, but we didn’t pay for it, all owing to a Kolai reject who charged a ten-man advance unit with nothing but a spear and a bucket of pitch, killed them all, then set fire to a galleon.  Among what I’m sure are many acts of heroism, of course.”

“Rumors are prone to exaggeration, Lord Stratus.”

“Perhaps, but I personally witnessed some of the carnage you left.  Impressive.  Ironic as well, given the actual Kolai were no damn help at all.”

“You honor me.  I can’t help but assume, though, that Piraeus’ most promising young admiral should have a more pressing cause for this meeting.”

“Most promising, Lord Polyon?  You honor me, though far less deservedly.”

“I am no lord.”

“Oh?  Am I mistaken, then, in my understanding that you are the son of Maria Athene, herself a cousin of Councillor Ekreon Athene?”

“I am not accustomed to masquerading as nobility here.  I am merely the son of an apiarist.”

“An unruly branch, to be sure, but you still possess the right to petition the council.”

“Provided I never avail myself of it.”

“…”

“…”

“Very well, Lord Polyon, I will get to the point.  You have heard the directive by now that the guards and navy both are to root out the remnant smuggling operations the Cabal still has in the city?  And I expect your commander has received additional intelligence regarding regular shipments arriving each week on the southern Fisher’s dock that then disappear into the city tunnels?”

“I have received both of these directives, yes.”

“Would it interest you to know that this second piece of intelligence was delivered by a known agent of Lord Teleos?  It would, wouldn’t it?”

“My interest in such a detail would be a dangerous thing to express, Lord Stratus.  Though if what you say were to be true, it would introduce a battery of additional questions.”

“Then let’s speak plainly.  My aims here are dangerous to express too.  Treasonous, some might say, but I think you’ll be receptive.”

“Receptive…to what?”

“I want to overthrow the council.  Teleos, Athene, Alcyon, all of them.”

“…”

“Come now, Lord Polyon.  I find it hard to believe you wouldn’t be interested.  Or do you not think me–”

“I’m listening, Lord Stratus.  Tell me more about this conversation with Teleos’ agent.”

My training took the better part of six years, in which time I enthusiastically apprehended the skills I would need as a soldier, as a mage, and as a de facto cleric of the Blood God.  I was good.  Far better than my recruiting class, better, even, than many of the Knights in full standing.  But it had turned out that despite these products of my hard work, my most interesting quality to chapterhouse leadership was actually my pedigree.  I was, of course, Piraean, but more uniquely, I was of the noble class–albeit its bourgeois fringe.  

As it was, the fight against the Atheists was angling more and more uphill with each passing year.  The Knights had little difficulty eliminating the radical elements who made themselves visible, but they were having a much more perilous time navigating the invisible gauntlet of small resistances the Atheists placed in their way.  Delayed responses from the Piraean Council, effectively tying the Knights’ hands in civil matters; the ubiquitous threat of petty theft and vandalism that compromised the movement of Blood Knight assets throughout the city; and the occasional assassination of Knights on patrol–retributed fiercely, but not fiercely enough to outweigh the attrition–all combined to ensure that the Knights’ existence in Piraeus remained decidedly hostile.  And where new Atheist aggressors seemed to spring up almost passively, owing to the unrest sowed by the noble families, new Knights…took six years to train.

It was, as the Knight Captain told me in a private meeting two weeks before my knighting ceremony, unsustainable.  Indeed, though I was not a Knight yet myself, I had felt the effects of the Atheists’ resistance keenly.  I had long since lost count of the meals I had skipped due to supply shortages, and just the previous month, Cassandra of Coralta–the Knight who had intervened on my father’s behalf at the city gates over a decade ago–had been killed when a group of Atheist riverwalkers pushed her from a pier in the harbor and held the water around her head until she asphyxiated.  She had been a mentor to me since I enlisted, and the rage that filled me when I heard the news has, to this day, only been equaled once.

It was for this reason especially that I was receptive to the assignment the Captain had for me in that meeting.  We could no longer ignore the Atheists’ inner workings, he said.  In all likelihood, they had an agent, an informant in the chapterhouse, and there was little we could do about it.  We simply could not afford to purge every Piraean from our ranks, and there was little else to go on.  The only sensible course of action was to manufacture a spy of our own.  I had the right characteristics, he said, and there was no one whose loyalty he trusted more.  It was a light blow to my pride that I would not have my knighthood recognized for some time–perhaps for years–but he knighted me there in his office.  Then, following a public and ignominious display of my expulsion from the chapterhouse for “disloyalty and heresy”, I was left on the streets of Piraeus to begin my mission.

Were the Atheists a centralized organization, I have little doubt that my chances of infiltration so soon after my exit from the chapterhouse would have been zero, pageantry or no.  But I knew they were not, and I knew the city guard had reason enough not to be suspicious of a new recruit.

If any faction had suffered worse attrition than the Knights in the Atheists’ protracted rebellion, it was Piraeus’ armed forces.  Since it was of the utmost importance that the Atheists did not establish anything resembling a fighting force, the guards and the navy had permanent places on the Knights’ list of usual suspects for any Atheist activity needing investigation.  Needless to say, damage to their ranks–both collateral and targeted–was substantial, and they were in constant need of new recruits to keep their numbers stable.  I had the martial skills they required, and they certainly did not have the luxury of investigating the unstated suspicions of the Piraean nobility.  They accepted my application without question, and within a few months, my history of allegiance to Piraeus’ “illegal occupiers” had been buried if not forgotten entirely.

I enlisted with the Blood Knights in the eighty-second year of the Blood God’s reign, when I was twenty years old.  This was somewhat older than most recruits, but my path in life had been dominated by other factors, and I had yet to seize any particular control over it.

The previous year, my father was stricken with a consumptive infection of the lungs and–mercifully, perhaps–passed quickly.  It wasn’t precisely the attack in Piraeus that had brought about his end: His injuries healed mostly, leaving him with a limp and limited function in his right eye.  But it had, in hindsight, been the beginning of a downward slide.

He, of course, did not return to the city from then on, for the very reasonable desire not to become a martyr or scapegoat to either side in the thinly-veiled conflict now ongoing between the Knights and Piraeus’ self-determinative Atheist faction.  But I suspected it was also deeper than that, a phobic unwillingness to face even the place, much less the people, which had subjected him to that trauma.  The result was that he was confined to our home and grounds, occupied by not busy, increasingly present and irritable to Mother, the servants, and myself.  That he was moving so much less than he had been, that even his limited mobility in that limited space was painful for him–it all meant that even before the infection set in, he had become little more than a cruel, vaporous reminder of his former self.  I found it striking that when he died, not even Mother truly mourned.

The legacy he left, though, was complicated for everyone.  Despite his many enemies, Father was still regarded as one of the most talented artisans in the region.  Our family’s honey fetched an outright exotic price as far away as Kol, and even despite our lifestyle of rural borderline-nobility, the business had been shockingly frugal.  It turned out Father had left behind a fortune in silver, valuable goods, and stock certificates in a number of successful merchant companies, each of which had been paying dividends for years.  The future of the apiary was, of course, uncertain, but it quickly became clear that Mother and I were in no danger of starvation.  What was less clear was whether either of us had any desire to carry on Father’s work.

Eventually we settled on a course.  Our head servant, Giuseppe, the very same servant who had sought help for Father the night of the attack, would take charge of the apiary, and when Mother passed, he would be the one to inherit it.  I, meanwhile, had taken my father’s rejection to heart and fully accepted I would have no future in beekeeping, truly assumed I had no aptitude for it.  And my mind had belatedly wandered to the political unrest in Piraeus, and tectonics of power I now saw shifting around us.  So it was with not insignificant enthusiasm that I renounced my inheritance and made my way to the city, determined to stand on the right side of history.

Despite my ardent opposition, I have little doubt that if the political skirmish I arrived in had taken place even twenty years later, the Atheists would have won handily.  Though the Knights were formidable warriors, anti-Kolai sentiment ran deeply through Piraeus, and they were outnumbered–possibly a hundred to one.  Their advantage was that the Uprising of the 79th was fresh in the collective memory of the Kolai dominion: Only three years earlier, the city of Cantabyz, the source of the majority of the Dominion’s iron, had declared open rebellion against the Magni Kolai.  The Blood God’s arrival at their gates–his first public appearance in a decade–claimed over 10,000 lives.

In the wake of this event, Piraeus’ cooler heads overwhelmingly opted to lie low, leavin the Knights to contend only with the Atheist’s firebrands.  My allegiances were unconflicted.  I had no grievance against the Kolai’s taxes, and the only meddling I had seen from the Knights had been clearly on the side of justice.  It did not matter that when I arrived at the chapterhouse, the squire on duty in the hall urged me to consider that I would very likely not become a Knight without any magical talent I knew about.  And it did not matter that my enthusiasm was met by a bemused chuckle from the only Knight in the hall at the time.  I had existed too long in a state of terror at the unbelonging I had felt from my father, from the apiary, from the indolent, insular people of Piraeus.  I knew that the Blood Knights–even simple service to the Blood Knights–was something greater that I would be glad to be part of.  The Knight Captain’s speculative nod, when it came time to provide him my reason for enlisting, was tepid vindication.  But it was enough.

My first contact with the Blood Knights was when I was eleven years old.  Against my father’s wishes, I was made to accompany him into the city on a delivery to the Hospitality Quarter, as the servant who normally helped him with those trips had fallen ill.  It was a fraught journey, but I was familiar enough with the work that I no longer roused his anger, so long as I stayed quiet.

Some years later, I would become acquainted with a common template of a man: the type who charmes, who is a socialite to all except those with whom he lives–to them he is a terror.  As that template is well understood by many, I wish to emphasize that my father was very certainly not this type of man.  He was not merely irritable and angry to his family–he was irritable and angry to everyone, and, as I discovered on this trip, these qualities had earned him enemies in Piraeus.

At the gates of the city, we were stopped by a guard who requested, smirking lasciviously, that my father produce his licensure.  Rather than showing documents, my father handed over a large parcel of his goods before continuing through the gates.  He did not offer me any explanation, and I did not ask, but I found the interaction decidedly tense.  And I was not the only one–I distinctly recall the skeptical glance of the woman in armor on the other side of the checkpoint.

As we were finishing our third delivery, that same woman approached us, carrying the parcel Father had given the guard.

“Piraeus has no licensure requirements for apiarists,” she said.  “I guess you knew that, but extortion is also prohibited.  If it happens again, you can let us know at the chapterhouse.”

Father accepted the parcel, eyes down and jaw set with an emotion that seemed perturbed but otherwise lacked definition.  When we passed back through the gates on our way home, the guard we had spoken with was no longer there, and the one who had taken his place fixed us with a look of such hatred that I could not bear to hold his gaze.

I was at the time too young, too sheltered to understand the political implications of what occurred that day, but as my role facilitating Father’s deliveries expanded, the situation grew clearer:

In those days, Piraeus was ruled by a council of elders who nominally commanded the loyalty of the city’s entrenched aristocracy.  It had been this way for as long as most citizens could remember, but where, a century ago, Piraeus had taken pride in being the last stronghold of Riverlander rule unswayed by the machinations of Spar, the city had finally surrendered rather than face ruin at the hands of the Blood God.  Even now, there were many Piraeans who resented this obeisance, who refused to recognize the Blood Knights’ authority to oversee and overrule the city’s various administrative functions.  That the Knights were largely hands-off and demonstrably less corrupt than their local counterparts–a notion for which the incident at the gate was, to me, irrefutable evidence–was beside the point.  Nor did it matter that the Blood Knights in Piraeus were a majority ethnically-Piraean: The Kolai were outsiders, and those that bent the knee were, behind certain doors, traitors.

Of course, when those criticisms emerged publicly, the repercussions were severe.  A month after that first incident, a group of guards, displeased with the Blood Knights intervening on his behalf, ambushed my father in the midst of his deliveries.  They destroyed his goods and beat him so severely that his servant had to fetch me and a separate wagon in order to bring him back home.  And though, to my knowledge, Father never reported the incident, the Knights seemingly discovered the incident on their own.  They massacred the city’s peacekeeping force, assuming their duties for the better part of a year, and the guards’ flayed and exsanguinated corpses were hung from the city walls for months after the altercation.

Father never set foot in Piraeus again.  I never learned whether he had a stance of his own on the Blood Knights’ rule.  He certainly did not seek their aid–I discovered from his ledgers that he had been paying bribes to the guards for over a decade.  But that was a stable arrangement: He was paying for his ill repute among the citizens.  It had nothing to do with the Blood Knights, and it was not by his will that his business became a battleground in their fight over who would control their hive.