The Legend of Broken

III: Stone

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The warm, gentle breeze that blows across the city of Broken from the west on this late spring night might be expected to offer some comfort to the greatly admired yet even more feared chief of the kingdom’s most powerful trading clan, Rendulic Baster-kin. Such soft, sensual waves of air, particularly when they occur at night, are known as “Kafra’s Breath,” for the welcome effect that they have on the citizens of the city, who are just emerging from beneath winter’s hard-soled boot. This widespread sense of joyous release is perhaps best embodied in the scattered pairs of trysting young lovers that the Lord of the Merchants’ Council can even now spy on the rooftops of their various houses in the First District from his vantage point on one of the two highest points in the city: the terrace that surrounds the central tower of the magnificent Kastelgerd Baster-kin. Both the terrace (once a parapet) and the tower were originally intended as defensive military positions, from which threats to the family and the city itself could be spied long before they became deadly; but for generations, that function has been unnecessary, and the tower as well as the terrace have served as the private sanctum of the Merchant Lord, a place to which the supreme secular official of Broken may summon any subject — nearly all of whom dread such invitations.

Far below the tower lies the foundation of the Kastelgerd, completely concealed from public view and composed of another section of the city’s remarkable series of vaulted storage chambers, which, like all the others, is filled to overflowing with weapons and provisions. Above the foundation, the visible wings of the great residence are on a scale, it has often been said (not always with respect or admiration) to match the palace of the God-King. But because the Kastelgerd sits hard by the eastern wall of the city, and was first intended to serve the same genuine military purpose as the tower, it is stouter in overall appearance than the sacred ruler’s paradise: a forbidding exterior that further cows those who are required to attend audiences within.

Yet throughout Broken’s history it has been the tower that has remained the most unnerving part of the Kastelgerd. If the Sacristy of the High Temple is Broken’s greatest wonder, and the royal palace the kingdom’s most beauteous enigma, then the tower is the clearest and plainest statement of raw power within the city’s walls. The Merchant Lord may have no religious title, as such, but his might is in no way diminished by the suggestion that it is not governed by sacred codes: quite the contrary. Thus, while most citizens would rather forgo a command to appear in either the Sacristy of the Temple or Baster-kin’s tower, they would far rather receive a summons to the holier of the two chambers — a fact from which Rendulic Baster-kin cannot help but derive a deeply personal satisfaction. A location that inspires so much fear in others is the only sort of place where this man, whose deepest soul is a strange blend of worldly severity and almost boyish enthusiasms and fears, can feel truly safe.

With his own security, as well as his family’s, nearly as well protected as the God-King’s, then, it seems odd indeed that Baster-kin — even and perhaps especially as he stands upon the parapet of his tower, this night — cannot allow himself to take any solace in the voluptuous brush of Kafra’s Breath. Indeed, the warm air only seems to make the uneasiness that is plain in his features more apparent.

His concern has been caused, first, by the latest in a series of reports that began to arrive during the winter, detailing the particulars of northern raiders bringing cheap grain up the Meloderna and the Cat’s Paw to trade illegally with undiscovered partners. Such a story would not, ordinarily, cause Rendulic Baster-kin undue anxiety: disgruntled farmers and traders in some quarter or another of the kingdom are a constant, given the sacred laws and secular codes that govern such activities in Broken. But dispatches over the last several days from Sentek Arnem have reported that more than one trading village has crossed over from unhappiness into open rebellion; and their violence has been unknowingly fueled, Arnem’s reports say, by spoilt grain, several kernels of which he has included for Baster-kin’s perusal, along with a warning that the Merchant Lord wash his hands carefully after inspecting them. Yet even this combination of provincial reports and those of the new commander of Broken’s army would not be enough to alarm Baster-kin, at any other time. But there is a final thread that does stitch these seemingly manageable problems into what may become a tapestry of serious worry: the samples of dangerous grain that Arnem has sent to the Merchant Lord resemble all too closely kernels that the ever-watchful master of Broken’s mightiest Kastelgerd has, within the last day and night, found in one of the hidden stores beneath the city.

Rendulic Baster-kin’s commitment and sacrifices to his kingdom and his office have always been great: far greater, he would rightly contend, than those of not only the other members of the Merchants’ Council and previous Merchant Lords, but even of his own father, the most infamously ruthless Baster-kin of all. Certainly, Rendulic believes that he has little in common with the earliest man in his family to be declared Merchant Lord, who had been the most cunning of the mercenary adventurers who accompanied Oxmontrot on his travels about the world in the service of the Western and Eastern halves of the vast yet strangely fragile empire of Lumun- jan, and who had brought the creed of Kafra back to Broken. Yet despite these shared adventures, according to rumors too well founded to die, it was not loyalty to Oxmontrot that secured the first Lord Baster-kin a place of prominence in Broken politics and society, but treachery. For his elevation in rank, along with the gift of resources sufficient to build the first wings of the Kastelgerd around the family’s original tower, had come not from the Mad King, but from Oxmontrot’s son, Thedric; and it had been said then, and has been said ever since, that the origins of both the Baster-kins’ renown and their wealth could be traced to complicity in the murder of the Mad King. Not many who had known Thedric, after all, had credited him with enough intelligence (or his mother, Justanza, with enough sanity) to have planned and carried out the scheme on their own; and construction of the Kastelgerd Baster-kin had indeed begun on the very day that Thedric had been crowned and declared semi-divine. Since then, additions to both the Kastelgerd and the elaborate, terraced gardens that wind about it have been almost constant — constant, that is, until the ascension of Rendulic Baster-kin, who has been determined to wipe away all smears upon his family’s name through his devotion, faith, and hard work.

In addition, if there have been more than a few unworthy men among his ancestors, Rendulic knows, there have also been several wise enough to merit respect. First among these were the Lords Baster-kin who — indignant at frequent abuses of power by the Merchants’ Council, which periodically sought to take advantage of the royal family’s isolation from secular affairs — created and strengthened an instrument of force with which to serve Thedric’s heirs: the Personal Guard of the Lord of the Merchants’ Council (or, more commonly, Lord Baster-kin’s Guard, as no other clan chief, after one or two early and disastrous challenges, has ever held the office). For many generations, the strict mandate of these not-quite-military units was simply to maintain the quiet, secure, and legal conduct of trade within the city. But eventually, being an instrument of secular power, the Guard had been corrupted, not only by rivals to the Baster-kins, but even (or so some voices said) by certain royal representatives, who wished their peculiar yet sacred activities to remain discreet. The Guard also widened its activities to include keeping the peace, a task that became ever more violent and even lethal, as the prevention of thievery and plots within the city expanded to include the authority to arrest, beat, torture, and even execute whatever persons, within or without the walls, the linnets of the Guard found objectionable. True, the head of the Baster-kin clan always retained command of the increasingly unpopular Guard; but command and control have ever been very different qualities. Then, too, while the clan Baster-kin may have been losing its effective grip on the Guard, the fact that its “soldiers” continued to keep careful watch over the great Kastelgerd lent to that residence and to its lords something like a regal air, one sufficient to allow the Lords Baster-kin to deny even well- founded charges of degeneracy, corruption, and effective tyranny: abuses, all three of which Rendulic’s father had managed to practice within one lifetime.

And so it would be for the man who now paces the terrace of his tower to reassert both his family’s honor and its devotion to Kafran ideals, a task that Rendulic has undertaken not only through public pronouncements and rulings, but by way of private methods more extreme than any citizen has ever known of or appreciated. Yet these