The gathering time was modest in length, though. It wasn’t long before the king and his company prepared to depart from the shelter, but Daun and a second guardsman hadn’t even gone outside ahead of the company yet when a distinct prickling came to Daun’s earlobes and slithered down and around to the back of his neck.
His eyes narrowed at the mysterious prompting from his senses.
He signaled for the company to hold tight behind him while he and the guardsman at his side sped their steps out of the building’s front doors, and Daun’s gaze was quick to cast about and lock onto a rising commotion across the street.
People had begun to stop and watch while two constables were tussling with a disheveled man, a man who started to wail.
The Mundayne tongue gushed in a rough flow from one constable as he hollered above the wailing man’s noise, “Hush up, imbecile! Do you not know the city is hosting the King of Diachona? We have no time for this. Today of all days!”
Daun was already running across the street, motioning for onlookers to stay back as he called toward the constables, “What is the trouble?” He stopped some feet away from them.
The hollering constable, with a face full of aggravation, looked over in Daun’s direction, the constable’s eyes popping wider as they whipped over Daun’s telling uniform. “It is nothing, pilo,” the constable asserted. “We beg your pardon. Just a vagrant we have run into before. He is always like this. We will get him away from here.”
“He is sick,” the other constable spoke up but in a quieter voice, more so to his partner than to Daun. “Sicker than usual. We ought to get him to a doctor.”
“To a doctor? To a zookeeper, more like!” the hollering constable retorted for the benefit of everyone’s hearing, but Daun’s attention had already moved from the constables to zero in on the man between them, whose wailing had given way to sniveling and whose only active part in the tussle seemed to be his struggle to stay on his feet, even though the constables had a hold of each of his arms.
The disheveled man’s black thatch of hair was currently a prime example of what would happen if one neglected to run a comb through such tight and tiny kinks, and the tufts of hair sprouting out of his sunken, reddened brown cheeks were in no way tamed or styled as an intentional beard. Sweat dotted the man’s forehead and darkened the underarms of the dingy shirt hanging on his frame, and as he lifted and dropped his head to heave out a rickety sob, though his dripping eyes were all but closed, Daun’s eyes enlarged to all but twice their normal size.
A beat or two, both infinite and instant, went by. A beat or two that Daun’s heart missed before it pounded back into motion. It pounded out and began to repeat in a pulsing rumble deafening to Daun’s core, even if to no one’s ears:
No. No.
The hollering constable was on the verge of another holler when Daun, without even raising a hand, and barely raising his voice, let the rumble go from only the pounding in his chest to become a low rumble issuing from his mouth, but in the form of a command.
“Drop him.”
The once-hollering constable stopped short, staring as if to figure out if Daun had truly just spoken or not, and the constable gave his head a shake. “Oh, pilo, we will get him out of—”
“Drop him.”
The two constables exchanged a swift look before they obeyed this guardsman of the king their city was hosting, and they backed away as the disheveled man fell to the ground.
The constables, the second guardsman watching Daun’s back, and the growing clusters of onlookers were nudged to the periphery of Daun’s consciousness as he took a step toward the man lying on the ground. Though the man was yet in noisy despair, Daun still didn’t raise his voice as he issued another command. “Get up.”
The man might or might not have heard the command as he made no move except to shake around in accordance with his sobbing.
After Daun took another step forward, he finally allowed his rumble to become an explosion of steam, but only a brief one and only by way of his voice. Most of his body went motionless, standing at attention to his own heated blast. The blast of a name.
“Felix!”
Some of the onlookers jumped, and just that fast, the prone man’s sobbing, and the better part of his shaking, came to a halt.
A few seconds passed, and the man scrambled to get up but only made it far enough to rest and waver on his knees. His glassy, dazed eyes lifted toward the volatile volcano looming over him, a spark of stunned recognition passing through the wavering man’s plain inebriation.
If there was to be an additional blast of steam, more than enough scalding magma roiled within Daun for it as he stood there, incredulous and fuming, staring down at the man teetering on his knees, but the quieter constable spoke up again.
“Um, pilo?” he addressed Daun. “Do you know this man?”
No answer was forthcoming from Daun as the fingers of his dominant hand flexed, all too aware of the firearm right within his reach on his person.
But it was the very awareness of that firearm that brought Daun back to himself before he strayed too far. He was armed because he was on assignment. Even if physical protection wasn’t the main reason the king wanted him in Garland, Daun was here today in the role of security detail, and the drunken, unkempt, bewildered creature teetering on the ground was no threat to the King of Diachona.
Daun backed off a step.
The quieter constable tried once more. “Do you know him? We will get him to a doc—”
“No doctor.” The order was out of Daun’s mouth before he realized it, but the second he did, he stuck with it. “No doctors…no favors.” It was all he could do not to spit down at the dust at the man’s knees. “Haul this worthless junk to jail and let him rot.”
The man on the ground wavered forward, recognition again peering through the liquid glass of his thunderstruck eyes as his mouth dropped weakly open, and Daun spun away then, walking a short ways off. He had to, as he’d come too close to circumventing his order about where to let the man rot to instead declare where the man could go to burn...
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