The Nameless Sentinel

Damián had vanished down the service chute the moment the first strike of iron rang out, leaving me alone with panic in the bedchamber. I slipped through the doorframe before the guards' boots rounded the arcade gallery.

Caterina stood petrified by the basin, a linen cloth pressed against her chest like a medieval shield against ghosts, but there was no time to pat her encouragingly or to explain that in my past life I also used to freeze when the floor manager showed up unannounced at the office. I lifted the hem of my gown with both hands so as not to trip on the uneven flagstones and squeezed into the cleft of the service corridor, a narrow tunnel where the stone was unpolished and smelled of an unglamorous mix of well dampness, cold stone, and burnt wax.

The metal echoed behind me. A dry thud of an ash staff against the floor.

"Make way for the lady of Moncada!" roared a voice with that pompous tone of someone who collects a salary for yelling at people.

I pressed myself against the wall. The stone pierced the fabric of my dress with an almost electric cold, making me bite my lip. Through the ventilation loophole, hidden behind a frayed tapestry depicting the hunt of a faded boar, I could spy on the noble corridor.

There went Sibila.

She walked with her back so straight it looked like she had an iron rod sewn to her spine. She wore a gown of dark purple velvet, almost black, with marten fur trim on the sleeves and an immaculate coif that didn't let show even half a millimeter of brown hair. Next to her, a lean fellow with salt-and-pepper beard and round horn-rimmed glasses clutched two bulging boiled-leather folders against his gut. The notary of Peñafiel. The bureaucrat who came to strip me of my fief before lunch.

Sibila didn't look to the sides. She looked straight ahead with that implacable smugness of people convinced that laws were written exclusively to prove them right.

"Total regional assistant manager vibe ready for a staff restructuring," I thought with a bitter snort. What a pain in the ass of a situation.

I tried to take a step to the right to confront her, just to see if a well-placed insult would disarm her pose, but the air instantly got stuck in my throat. A sharp pinch stabbed my ribs and my knees stiffened as if they had injected molten lead into my joints. I had to lean against the rough wall, breathing slowly through my nose until the rigidity eased.

The world wasn't going to let me break the script the hard way.

Fine. If the front door was blocked by notaries and armor, it was time to play through the sewers.

I went down the spiral staircase descending toward the cellars, where the air changed temperature with every flight. Halfway down the spiral, the grayish light of the rain slipped through the leaded skylights, revealing fine dust floating lazily between the rotted beams.

I stopped for a second on the landing to adjust one of the sleeve ribbons that had come undone and lashed my wrist with every stride.

The silence of the descent was thick.

Down below, however, the fortress breathed with a very different lung. It was no longer the stale stench of wax from the chapels or the heavy lavender perfume with which Sibila tried to cover the damp stink of her quarters. Down here, earthly life ruled: a warm blast of toasted butter, raw dough freshly fermented on oak troughs, and a fresh scraping of lemon peel floating among the warm steam of the stoves.

The lower kitchens.

On my screen back in Chapinero, this place would have been a three-second background image with a flute melody playing to indicate a rest zone. Here it was a suffocating labyrinth of copper cauldrons the size of bathtubs, butchery tables stained with coarse salt, and barefoot boys running with turnip baskets.

I crossed behind the pantries without anyone paying me any mind. The scullery boys were too busy dodging the shouts of a fat cook who brandished a wooden ladle like a war mace. I plunged my hand into the wicker basket resting on a burlap sack full of rye flour—rough to the touch, scraping my fingertips which still retained Violante's aristocratic softness—and pulled out a piece of crusty bread freshly taken from the embers.

It was still burning.

I smeared a generous dollop of warm butter on it with my thumbnail and put my booty away, wrapped in a dish towel, in the purse I wore tied beneath my gown.

Updated inventory: a piece of warm bread with butter, zero coins in the purse, and ninety days scraped so they wouldn't chop off my head.

Brilliant. Monumental progress.

The passageway connecting the kitchens to the dock warehouses was blocked by a wrought-iron gate with rivets as thick as walnuts. The bolt hinge groaned every time the wind blew from the bay.

And stationed by the gate, leaning with apparent reluctance on a halberd whose iron showed dings from real use, was him.

Damián. He had slipped on the studded leather brigandine of the Gray Guard over his tunic with startling speed. His broad shoulders were wedged into the regulation stance, the bridge of his nose slightly tilted to the left, and that tired, heavy-lidded gaze fixed an exact inch above my forehead so as not to incur contempt of court.

I stood still three steps away, half-hidden behind a salty granite column.

I mentally reviewed the guide that had kept me awake so many dawns in Bogotá. I knew the characters of this stretch by heart: Beltrán the servile steward, Father Guillem the scheming chaplain, Captain Bernat of the outer guard... but this sentinel posted by the flour sacks didn't appear in any official route. Not a single line assigned, not a single mention in the forums. He was a low-ranking prop guard, a dialogueless lump in the game's canon.

A ghost in the system who had just conspired with me in the bedroom and was now pretending to be an armed statue.

I approached slowly. The damp flagstones barely made a sound beneath my fine leather-soled shoes, but he squared his feet and tightened his fingers on the ash staff before I crossed the shadow line. He didn't break his martial rigidity or genuflect; the Code of Silence punished any sentinel who struck up a conversation with the nobility with public flogging, but his jaw clenched with the same insolence as a while ago.

"The ladies of the upper chamber don't come down to the flour," he muttered through his teeth, without moving his neck, in that raspy voice that sounded like tavern smoke.

"The ladies of the upper chamber sometimes have an appetite for things that don't taste like ash," I replied, stopping just on the other side of the iron crossbar. "I see the descent agreed with you."

Damián didn't blink. He had a grease stain on the collar of the brigandine, and the small white scar crossing the corner of his lower lip tightened as he swallowed.

"The Council forbids passage toward the posterns. And the lady of Moncada has her men counting even the anise seeds at the customs house."

"Sibila de Moncada isn't regent yet," I shot back, crossing my arms. "I saw her pass by with the bureaucrat. She's just missing a few red wax seals and the notary letting the ink dry."

Damián let out a brief snort through his nose. It didn't quite reach a laugh, but the corner of his mouth moved barely a millimeter.

"The notary of Peñafiel charges per signed sheet, my lady. That ink dries fast when there's silver involved."

"Such faith you have in feudal justice, hey."

"I have faith in bacon and the afternoon tide, which are the only two things that never fail on this rock."

At his belt, next to the old raw hemp holster, the copper edge of the Genoese pilot's compass he had shown me upstairs peeked out. He brought his left hand to the lining of his doublet, instinctively feeling the lump of a twisted horseshoe nail to curb the urge to keep talking.

I pulled the rag with the piece of bread from my purse. The heat of the melted butter had soaked the fabric, giving off that dense, comforting aroma of dough toasted over a wood fire that beats any courtly banquet.

"Here," I said, holding it out through the cold iron bars.

Damián looked at the bread. Then he looked me in the eyes, evaluating me like someone calculating the weight of cargo before loading it onto the barge. If a patrol officer came down and caught him accepting food from a fallen noblewoman, the sentence wouldn't stop at a reprimand.

Even so, he stretched out a large hand, with calloused knuckles and soot-stained fingers, and took the bread.

"In the margins always live the people who truly hold up the walls," I murmured, almost to myself.

Damián split the crust with his thumbs with a clean crunch. He put a piece in his mouth, chewed slowly, and swallowed without taking his gaze off the point an inch above my head.

"In the margins they skin our backs if we open our mouths, my lady," he whispered harshly, sliding the rest of the bread under the leather of the brigandine. "Move along before the patrol comes down. You have eighty-nine days left."