Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

The Upper City hadn’t changed much in the last six years. The only entrance to the gilded inner city – the core of the king’s power – was the sixty foot marble staircase located in the center of the merchant district. The massive portcullis gates sitting about twelve feet in front of the stairs kept anyone from the Under City from entering. The merchants more or less had a free pass to enter and leave as they please but it still required a blue mark from the City Guard to get through. It would not do to have a merchant with negative views of the Upper City getting into the King’s Palace at will.

Something in the back of Brutus’s head remembered part of Sarina’s story. How had she managed to get men and women from the Under City into her home to present things to her if the gates were up. Had she instructed them to let anyone in asking for her? Would the guard even do such a thing? He didn’t know any longer. Six years was a long time in Upper City Politics. Willemshire was the capitol of a very small nation but it had dozens of royals – the aftermath of the first King Willem trying to expand his influence – awarding fiefdoms and titles to anyone that would come to live in the city and bow before him. A handful of royals didn’t technically own any land – rather they were Dukes of streets and Barons of gutters within the cities – contrived titles to give them more power than they technically ever had. It was amusing to a man like Brutus who had been born on a farm outside the city and had only spent time in Willemshire as a result of his high test scores to enter the Royal Guard Academy. He had ended up in the City Guard only after a few poor decisions with the sons and daughters of royals in the Academy.

While it was probably rather unlikely that anyone was going to have forgotten Brutus’s face if he was to go through the main gates, he didn’t have much of a choice. Now, he just needed to figure out how to get through. He had the benefit of a swollen face and a bloodied chin – the problem of course was that he had a swollen face and a bloodied chin. The guards given gate duty weren’t bright but they knew when to draw lines. It probably wouldn’t work to try and get through this way without a plan.

Instead of bursting through the gate without a plan, Brutus decided to return to Cribbly’s shop – the old man would have a way to get him through the gate. The thugs may have beaten him senseless, but they hadn’t robbed him – so he still had the coin on him that Sarina had given him – at least 125 coin still in his jacket. Another 350 was buried behind his woodstove back home and the rest was either in his belly or in the whisky bottle laying on the floor beneath his palate back home.

It took him longer than expected to get from the gate to Cribbly’s shop. The streets were more crowded than normal for as early as it was. Men and women were milling about while most of the shops still hadn’t been opened. He couldn’t see ahead very far – his left eye continuing to swell, now blocking most of his vision on that side – but something clearly had them around.

It didn’t take long for him to find out what it was – laying in the street face down, his neck twisted at an impossible angle and his clothes torn around his chest was Cribbly. 

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