The Mechanical Crown

The call of power

Emptying the glass, Tranton sighed again and stood, moving to the open window, where he leaned on the sill. "This is your life, Tarn. You need to have a good think about what you want. Not anyone else - you."

"Fenris thinks I should do it."

"Of course he does!" Tranton shouted, slamming his palm onto the sill. "He's been waiting for this his whole life, even if he didn't quite have the details worked out. This gives his life meaning - but he's not the one having to make the big decision."

"Kirya doesn't think it'd a good idea."

"That's because she's got her head screwed on the right way, even if she is a spoiled brat who doesn't understand how the real world works. Neither of those people are you. What's going on in your head?"

Tarn leaned on the sill next to Tranton, listening to the bigger man's breathing. He'd not known him for long - only since leaving Bruckin - but there was something about his command of the world that appealed to Tarn's instincts. Tranton never let anything dominate him. "There is one thing I want."

"And what's that?"

"A proper family. A family of my own, where I belong."

Tarn could feel Tranton's eyes boring into him. The man continued to stare at him for what felt like a very long time, while Tarn studiously examined the flowers in the garden beyond his room, or gazed distractedly up at the clouds.

After a minute has passed, Tranton reached out and put an arm over Tarn's shoulders. "If that's what you're after," he said gently, "then you've come to the wrong place. And if you take that power, then you'll never know who your real friends are."

He looked down at the wooden window frame, which was as perfectly constructed as everything else in Aviar. "I think sometimes that perhaps you're my friend," he said, tentatively.

"Ha!" laughed Tranton, clipping Tarn across the back of his head. "I'm the last person anyone wants as a friend." He paused, leaned in closer. "But if it's my friendship you want, then fine. You've got it."

"I've seen people in Lagonia, and Bruckin, and here, all with families. Parents, children. I don't know how to get that."

Turning his back to the view outside the window, Tranton leaned back against he wall. "Sometimes it just happens. Sometimes it doesn't."

"Do you have a family?" Tarn asked. From the flicker that passed across Tranton's face, Tarn knew immediately that he shouldn't have asked. "You don't have to answer that," he said quickly.

Grimacing, Tranton looked down at the floor, then up at the ceiling, as if trying to avoid the gaze of someone Tarn couldn't see. "When you're young, you think you're invincible. As you get older, you start noticing all the ways you can die. All the ways that people you love can die. You start counting them, listing them off, wondering which one is going to hit first. Drowning, or being hit by a cart? Crushed by falling scaffolds, or attacked by a thief? Bitten by a snake, or poisoned by badly cooked food? Heart attack in bed, or disease? They just keep on coming."

"Did all of those happen to your family?"

Tranton laughed again, quietly, softly, through his nose. "Not all of them," he said.

They stood in silence, listening to the sounds of the city - discs humming overhead, shouts from a nearby market, leaves rustling in the wind.

"You think I should say no," Tarn said.

Tranton turned towards him and looked him in the eyes. "Life is about continually realising that your understanding of the world is wrong," he said. "You then either deny the truth, try to change it, or accept it and move on. You've been put in a situation you can't possibly understand. None of us can understand it."

"That's not very helpful."

"It's not supposed to be helpful. I can't help you with this, Tarn. I think you already know your answer, anyway."

Tarn disagreed, but didn't say so aloud. He'd never felt so unsure of himself: he'd been confused plenty of times but had always had a sense of his own direction, ever since he'd crawled into the pipe that had led him out of the machine rooms. This time there was no such escape route.

He crossed the room to where his clothes and supplies remained in his pack; taking them out hadn't occurred to him. "What if we just leave?" he asked, picking up the pack. "If we just go, away from here, away from the valley. Lagonia seems to far away now, I almost have trouble remembering whether it's real or not. If I never go back, it wouldn't make much difference."

"Now you're talking my language," Tranton said, grinning. "But that's probably not an option this time. Not without giving them some kind of answer. After that, though, if you want to go, then we'll go."

All Tarn's choices seemed jumbled up, twisted together in a big ball of string, so that he couldn't tell where one started and another finished. He wished he was back in the caravan, with Fenris and Kirya, before anyone had expected him to make decisions that would alter the fate of an entire city.