Heart of Ash (The Dark Arcane Series: Book 1)

Chapter Two

Hunting for the runes was a long, methodical process.

The keep was situated more towards the outskirts of the city so her assignments required her to travel to the centre.

The grey, mundane city was calming in its consistency and sturdiness. The roads were laid out with the same cobbled stones and the houses were all built of the same style. With the exception of its people, the city was predictable, and she liked simple.

Her first points of business in the bloody city: finding alcohol, and a smoke den. And she meant that quite unashamedly in any order. While she would have preferred to hunt for runes straight away, it was better to wait until evening, when less people were around.

The bloody city of Brialdia was a dull, drab assortment of small yellow stone walls with dark shadows lining each rough edge, and metal work displayed round every corner. The buildings were centred around a clock tower where each road, no matter how many turns she took, always seemed to lead to.

The blanket of clouds shed a monotone grey onto the city. Of course, the time she was working, it decided to pack away the usual hot weather for it's days of indeterminable weather, stuck between rain and cloud.

Despite her efforts to avoid them, each street corner seemed to be owned by the same overly enthusiastic stall vender who tried to flog their fancy mechanical contraptions—from cogs that spun forever (in reality a few mere hours) to a tiny structure of a man that took off his hat to reveal a candle wick (although impressive in looks, would only provide light for a few minutes)—so she kept to the taverns, however tasteless the drink might be, and with a heavy mug.

Ashyn had her unruly black hair tied low out of the way, and watched with a sharp gaze from the top of her cup at those in front of her. She methodically and casually sized up each and every person, marking their risk of posing a danger like scrawling a number on their foreheads.

The paranoid barkeep kept counting the money hidden beneath the counter every five minutes, and there was a rowdy game of pyesheu not far from him; the former was forgettable in its unimportance but she made sure to keep the latter in her peripheral vision. A quieter crowd of four men sat in the far corner, crouched round another game of pyesheu—a gambling game based on strategy but mostly luck.

She dropped the mug down on the table a little harder than she intended but she met every single look she received with a stare of her own.

A six month long assignment was a long time but—and Ashyn almost smiled at the thought—after this assignment, it would all be worth it. Enough of the runes should be marked and visible and the Ka l'asterei would grant her request she made all those years ago when she joined.

Ashyn curled the side of her lips as she lifted the chipped mug again.

The runes were engraved in almost all parts of the city. Invisible lines and symbols and circles that sparked gold when activated; when a witch neared it's vicinity. The runes were ruthless in their work.

The runes had seen witches being blown up into nothing but scraps of flesh, and had forced the Ka L'asterei to watch sisters being burned alive, and those who remembered the Three-Day War had heard the scream of vaetterre being stripped away from a witch, ripped away from their bones like wings from an eagle.

The bloody emperor had created the runes in the Three-Day War, establishing them all round the city, forcing the witches out, rune by rune. But the presence of humans, curiously, did nothing to activate the runes.