The Castle Thief

This story takes place during the events of The Lost City of Ithos.

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Lane always struggled with normal gravity— they hadn’t stepped off Solintus' shell and onto the ground until they were twenty-two years old. Even after years of diplomatic missions for Solintus, normal gravity still felt… flat, dull, oppressive. None of the subtle twists, curves, or loops like those atop Solintus’ shell. When you leapt on the surface of Anastis, you only ever fell in one direction.

Like everything else about the surface, Lane found normal gravity profoundly boring, and resented every minute of it.

So the fact that the ruling council of Calo’s Watch was taking so much time agreeing on a price for their city’s fortress tested every ounce of Lane’s patience and decorum.

“The sale is non-negotiable,” Lane said, for the hundredth time. “If you fail to agree on an acceptable price for your fortress, Solintus will merely seize it, with none of the care for collateral damage he would take otherwise.”

Magister Wilken spluttered pointless protests, but Lane kept their gaze fixed on Magisters Hatherly and Luden. Wilken was a wealthy, blustering idiot— the real power lay with the other two rulers, both powerful archmages. 

The fact that they’d held off on making an offer was baffling to Lane. The groundlings couldn’t possibly hope to fend Solintus off- the two archmages were powerful, but Solintus had dozens of archmages just as powerful living in the city atop his back, even ignoring his own mountain-leveling power.

Something stank in Calo’s Watch- something other than the ever-present peat mines.

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“It doesn’t make any sense,” Lane said, glowering at their former teacher, back atop Solintus. “They surely know that they cannot dissuade Solintus from taking their fortress— nor is delaying going to help win any better price for it. The closer our master draws to Calo’s Watch, the worse their bargaining position is. Something else is going on.”

Owen Erm glanced up at them, then looked back to his gravity garden, where he was making minute adjustments to the orbits of several jewels around an alchemically preserved rose blossom.

“This is hardly the first such time a city has resisted the rightful way of things, Lane. At least they’re not fool enough to resist by force of arms.”

“Yes, but they’re still being utterly irrational. I—”

Owen gestured for silence, then made another orbital adjustment to a particularly large spherical garnet.

“You’re right that they’re being irrational from the perspective of what is best for their city— but rational decision-making is a rare thing. It is far more common for our ground-dwelling lessers to make decisions irrationally, whether out of spite or self-interest. Speculate on possibilities, Lane.”

Lane sighed at being ordered about like a student again, but pressed their mind to the task regardless.

“It could be a vengeance play— they might be booby-trapping their fortress with enchantments or alchemical weapons in an effort to harm our master.”

Owen nodded as he adjusted the mirrors on the ceiling above his gravity garden to better reflect the interlocking orbits. “It wouldn’t be the first time, though our mages inspect carefully for such traps.”

“Someone always thinks they’re clever enough to be successful where all others have failed, teacher.”

Owen raised a knowing eyebrow at them, and Lane couldn’t help but smile at memory of some of their own youthful experiments with magic. At one point, they’d actually thought it possible to become a Thunderbringer with only gravity magic, without wind or force.

Needless to say, several broken bones had proven them wrong.

“I think your point about self-interest might be a likelier one, teacher,” Lane mused. “One or more of Calo’s Watch’s magisters might be profiting from the delay in some way or other.”

“A likely motive, but we need more than a motive,” Owen said.

Lane was about to continue their speculation when Owen’s door opened, and two entirely unexpected figures stepped in.

Aster Argo and Lyon the Mirthful.

Lane saved most of her displeasure for Aster. The elegant woman had been a student of Owen’s alongside Lane, but when Owen had fallen from power, Aster had  vanished from his circles, immediately attaching herself to other, higher-favored servants of Solintus.

Servants like Lyon the Mirthful— who was named not for any natural good cheer, but for the scar that warped his face into a perpetual smirk.

“I hear your negotiations are going as expected,” Aster said, not even bothering to hide her sneer.

“I hear you’re as backstabbing and untrustworthy as expected,” Lane replied.

Owen sighed heavily. “Lane, I’m sorry to cut our talk short, but could we speak another time?”

Lane gave their old teacher a skeptical look, then nodded slowly.

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The next day was as unproductive as the previous, no matter how many new angles Lane tried with the Magisters.

The meeting dragged on for nearly three hours, without the slightest hint of a useful resolution by the end. It was, to say the least, absolutely infuriating. 

Lane barely managed to offer a polite farewell at meeting’s end, and didn’t bother exiting the meeting by the door, simply flying out the window.

They had zero patience for mundane gravity at the moment, nor for walking on the ground.

Solintus was only an hour’s flight away from Calo’s Watch at this point, and Lane felt themself relax as the mother-of-pearl towers rose up over the horizon.

Well, mostly mother-of-pearl. The iridescent nacre hadn’t fully engulfed Solintus’ last addition, a multi-pronged tower gifted to the immense xenophora snail by the Alikeans. Solintus could use his nacre affinity to force his mother-of-pearl to grow more swiftly when he desired, of course, but taking more time to do so made the end-product far stronger.

Regardless, the dozens of small to mid-sized castles and fortresses along Solintus’ back composed, in Lane’s opinion, the most beautiful city on the continent. It was endlessly insulting the way outsiders referred to Solintus as “castle-sized” or spoke of his “rocky bulk”. Certainly, there were a few great castles that rivaled the snail in size, and admittedly, Solintus’ nacre covered up countless tons of stone, but…

The descriptions all failed to do justice to his majesty.

Lane felt their citizenship tattoo flare, and smiled as they felt Solintus’ gravity magic take over from their own and guided them in for a landing.

It was good to be home.

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Lane channeled their mana into a specific segment of their citizenship tattoo, and its spellforms flared again as Solintus’ gravity currents guided them towards a supplication chamber. The mother-of-pearl tattoo glowed along Lane’s forearm brightly enough that it shone even through their silk robes.

There was a lot of traffic above and between the towers rising up from Solintus’ shell, but given Lane’s rank, and the according size of their tattoo, they were given priority over most of the other air traffic.

Lane’s flight did seem slightly slower than usual, however, and part of them wondered if Solintus was displeased at the speed of the negotiations.

That said, the idea that Solintus paid attention to all the movement of his subjects along his back was a controversial one. Most of Lane’s colleagues believed it was a largely autonomous process, governed by the enchanted spellforms Solintus had grown inside the nacre of his shell.

Lane logically agreed with their arguments, but part of them couldn’t shake a superstitious conviction otherwise.

They landed gently in the supplication chamber— one of the larger ones, a good sign. Like all the supplication chambers, it was only accessible to the highest-ranked of Solintus’ subjects and cultists, and to cleaners who would never be allowed to seek audience with the snail.

It was only just, of course. They’d had their chances in their placement exams, and if they’d scored any lower, they would have been executed. Or, worse yet, even banished from Solintus if they’d done badly enough.

Lane knelt in front of the supplication chamber’s flat sandgarden the instant they landed. By the time they lifted their head from the tile, their master had already written in the sand using his gravity magic, carving letters in the sand with shifting gravity tides.

Report, Lane.

Lane took a deep breath, then gave her report. 

No one was entirely sure how Solintus could hear their reports— whether his gravity sense was powerful enough to detect the sound waves as they moved through the air, or whether he had some more prosaic listening spellforms grown into the nacre of the walls.

It didn’t matter. Solintus could listen to anything and anyone he chose atop his back.

The great snail responded immediately once the report was concluded.

You have five more days to negotiate.

Then, with a subtle gravitational pulse, the words were wiped away, and the sandgarden was flat once more.

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Lane began their investigation that night.

No one noticed them as they hovered over the fortress of Calo’s Watch, seated cross-legged hundreds of feet in the air.

It was said that Solintus could make out every detail of an embroidered tapestry using only his gravity sense from leagues away, feel the movement of every flea and fly from even farther. While Lane’s gravity affinity sense wasn’t as powerful as their master’s, it was still more than enough to feel out the inside of the fortress, to feel the gravity of the walls and people inside.

The fortress had been mapped extensively already by Solintus’ servants, but Lane wasn’t trying to discover anything new— just to get a feel for the patterns of movement inside the fort.

After speaking to Owen, Lane had spent their free time the past couple of days poring through the archives— with, of course, the aid of a dozen of their clerks. It was the clerks’ honor to serve. 

In the century and a half of Solintus’ activity on Ithos, after arriving from his former world, there had been plenty of attempts to resist him. They grew rarer and rarer over the years, but they’d never stopped entirely.

Lane’s top priority had been sorting the attempts into categories. One of Owen’s most important lessons had been in regard to humanity’s inherent incompetence with statistics. The average human— or dragon— was buffoonishly inept at accurately estimating frequencies of events.

Sphinxes were reputed to be more skilled at it, and it was no problem at all for Solintus, of course.

The mere act of counting the various attempts, sorting them into categories, and charting their frequencies over time had proved remarkably informative.

The most common category was, unsurprisingly, various city-states and great powers overestimating their own power or underestimating Solintus. This one, however, had shown a steady decline over the decades.

Lane discounted that one almost immediately. The Magisters of Calo’s Watch were many uncomplimentary things, but even their foolishness wasn’t so all-encompassing.

The second most common category was, as Owen had suggested, greed and self-interest. Lane found themself dividing greed into multiple sub-categories, however. Rulers seeking bribes, seeking citizenship atop Solintus, etc, etc. 

None of those seemed to apply here. The Magisters hadn’t reached out to her with those sorts of demands, after all.

There were a couple of sub-categories of greed and self-interest that seemed likelier, however.

The first of which was power-jockeying— that the delays might not be about Solintus at all, but were instead just puerile, short-sighted games between the rulers of Calo’s Watch. That, perhaps, one or more of the Magisters were using Solintus’ approach as an opportunity to seize more control for themselves. It wouldn’t surprise Lane. Of course, there was little stupidity or shortsightedness that would surprise Lane, when it came from groundlings.

Slightly less frequent, but still common, was law-breaking on the part of a figure of power. Smuggling operations being run by a council-member, a coup in progress, that sort of thing. The approach of Solintus often ended up ruining those sorts of plots in one way or another, and so the delay could be an attempt to protect some such plot from collapse.

And that was why Lane sat far above Calo’s watch, doing their best to ignore the cold north wind— they were looking for signs of smuggling operations, for stockpiled weaponry or alchemy for a coup, for puzzling or unusual activity in the night. It would have been nice if Lane could have recruited others to help, but as high-ranked as Lane was, they weren’t yet high enough in Solintus’ favor to be able to command other servants who were legally permitted to leave Solintus’ back.

So they sat alone above the castle for hours, all in vain.

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Lane hardly paid attention to the negotiations the next day. Their lack of sleep hardly helped, of course, but Lane had both the experience and the alchemicals to handle that.

No, their attention was still fixed on the reason for the stalling.

The more Lane considered the matter, the more obvious it grew that the Magisters were stalling.

There were options, of course— they could give the Magisters an ultimatum, kill one of them per day until they agreed to her demands. 

Lane preferred to avoid that route if at all possible, however. Not because they particularly valued the lives of groundlings, but because that sort of brutality was just… gauche. It would be like wearing weapons to a ball, or getting drunk at breakfast. It was the same reason Solintus gave the groundlings an opportunity to sell their fortifications, rather than merely stealing them.

For all their lack of worth, Lane prided themselves on treating groundlings politely. Many of their brethren thought of the groundlings as irrational, barely sentient beings. A tasteless stance, in Lane’s opinion, but almost as intolerably, a foolish stance. Groundlings could be irrational at times, but their endless, revolting self-interest often made them, if anything, more rational than Solintus’ servants.

And Lane couldn’t figure out where that self-interest lay for the Magisters. Owen had surely been right to point them in the correct direction, but…

Lane paused in her thoughts, and a smile spread across  their face, much to the alarm of the Magisters.

Lane had been asking the opposite question that she should have been.

What interests did Solintus’ other servants have here?

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If you had told Lane they’d fail a week earlier, they would likely have challenged you to a duel in the gravity-free arena above Solintus, but as Lane watched Solintus rip the fortress of Calo’s Watch free from the ground, their face hurt from the smile splitting it.

Boulders fell free from the foundations, crashing through homes and shops, killing who-knew how many. If the Magisters had come to an agreement, Solintus would have taken more care, but no such agreement had been reached.

As the peaty ground splashed upwards from the impacts, Lane caressed the folder in their hands and kept smiling.

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Solintus hadn’t even finished affixing the new fortress to his back when Lane’s hearing began.

Judge Iramnus, the third-highest ranked of Solintus’ servants, hadn’t even begun reading out the charges against them when Lane broke protocol and walked up to Iramnus’ throne. They handed the judge the folder of papers, then waited with a smile while Iramnus peered through it.

“You are prepared to swear on all of this?” Iramnus asked.

Lane nodded. “As are all my clerks and witnesses.”

Iramnus nodded. “It seems we’ll have new defendants today.”

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It hadn’t been a difficult riddle, once Lane had taken a step back.

In their years studying with Owen, there had been one lesson that he’d drummed in above all others:

Only the servants of Solintus truly had free will, because free will only came with servitude. The groundlings, with their freedom, only served their self-interest, were endlessly caught up in their betrayals and wars for power.

It was only the act of giving up power entirely to Solintus, escaping the endless violence of the surface, that gave one the option for true choice.

The answer to the behavior of the Magistrates had become obvious once Lane had taken their step back.

If they didn’t have obvious self-interest in delaying, they wouldn’t have been capable of choosing to delay.

So Lane only had to look at people who had the capability to choose.

Which was to say: Servants of Solintus.

Owen had been clever, diverting her to focus on the groundlings, but in retrospect, she should have immediately been suspicious of Aster and Lyon visiting him. It hadn’t taken long to get the groundlings to confess, once she started increasing their weight. Magisters Wilkens and Hatherly had actually survived the interrogation, though it was unlikely Hatherly would walk again.

Lane was a little disappointed in themself for having to resort to such unfashionable methods, but it was a minor disappointment.

Corroborating evidence had, likewise, been easy enough to find. Aster had been especially cruel to her underlings, and it had been easy to subvert a few of them, get them to level accusations against Lane’s old rival.

Many of those accusations had even been true.

Solintus encouraged competition among his servants. It kept them sharp, kept them ready to oppose and face the nastiness of the surface. If they couldn’t withstand the schemes of their fellows, what use were they?

There was a limit to how far one could take the competition, though, and the trio had crossed that line when they had interfered with Lane’s mission.

The servants were never, ever, to interfere with their master’s interests. And, by forcing Solintus to seize the fortress of Calo’s Watch by might, rather than in a more convenient fashion, they had crossed far, far over the line.

They would have been far better off simply murdering Lane.

Despite Owen’s betrayal, they argued fiercely for clemency for him, to allow him the grace of suicide. It had probably used up a considerable fraction of the goodwill Lane had earned by revealing the conspiracy, but it had been worth it. Owen, in the end, had only joined the conspiracy out of a promise to help him regain Solintus’ favor. It had been foolish, of course, as none but Solintus could guarantee his favor, but it had still been done out of love for the proper order of the world. That deserved a certain consideration.

To Lane’s immense gratification, not only had Owen been granted his suicide, he had thanked them with tears in his eyes. Even if he was to be denied an honored burial, denied being mummified in mother-of-pearl to stand statue-like among the great servants of Solintus for eternity, it was a better fate than that of Aster or Lyon.

Lyon had, to his credit, killed himself the moment he had set foot upon the ground. It was no honorable suicide like Owen’s, but it showed resolve.

Aster, to Lane’s delight, had chosen to live. Chosen to live with the dishonor of exile. Chosen to live without the joy of service to Solintus.

It was a fitting fate for Lane’s old rival.

To commemorate, Lane had already sought placement within the new fortress, once installation had been completed. It would be a few months until it was fully stabilized and sufficiently nacre-coated for residence, but it would always remind Lane of their victory.

Of course, there was still plenty of work to do. Alikean enchanters wanted to purchase more mother-of-pearl, several bandit groups were refusing to pay the tribute they owed, and the mountain clans were testing the edges of Solintus’ rule again.

Lane looked forward to the challenges.

Only in service to Solintus could be found true joy, after all.

The process of writing this short story was a weird one. It kept struggling to take shape, and it took twice as long as it should have to hammer it in place. Eventually I figured out that the issue was one of length- The Castle Thief was a short story that wanted to be a novel instead. I have absolutely no interest in writing an entire novel about a snail-worshipping fascist bureaucrat, however, so The Castle Thief gets to stay a short story. Still, it was fun getting to explore one of the mightiest and weirdest great powers of Ithos. (Xenophora snails, btw, are real- but they're only a few inches across on Earth, and glue other seashells to their own shell. Definitely worth googling some images.)