Chapter 5 - Part II

Lady Genevieve dismissed the boys carting the wagon with an effortless swipe of a gloved hand, to the relief of many of her weak stomached guests. The wagon lumbered to the massive wooden doors that served as the only public exit from the chamber.

"Let all who enter the Archne District know that we shall not suffer injustice. Any who enter, or pass by our gates in Center City will know this truth, as you all know it today. " she promised as the bodies disappeared from the room to be dismembered and displayed on pikes at the edge of Center City.

Satisfied, Ruby glanced at Lord Lot, adorned in soft yellow silks, a gift she had bestowed on him only days before. His clearly visible blue rein tattoo seemed to be jumping from the high necked garment to rest on the cartilage lobe of his left ear.

Her lover was seated before the dais, along with some of her friendlier partners in the Dance of Roses. The hard, elegant woman was clothed in an open backed, sleeveless and shoulder-less dress of light blue silk and satin. She wore a thinly quilted green corset of roughly woven silk threads and golden faux buttons. With all the confidence and aesthetics of a true born noble, she assumed the guilded seat in the middle of the dais. This was the seat upon which she was born to sit.

A spindly but youthful man of servant stock awaited the Lady Genvieve with an array of fearsome tools and vials of rick, dark blue. After a few more cursory opening remarks by the Lady, he set to his craft.

Ruby had spent days training, that this day she might not flinch, that no cry would escape her lips as the needle penetrated her flesh and the pores of her left ear bloomed ink in shades of blue. In and out the needle plunged and while the atmosphere had since melted into a sea of casual spectators, only a fool would think that the nobles did not keep a keen eye towards their new sister. She would dance, and she would dance well if they were to suffer her among their number.

But Ruby's sweat and pain never turned into a single complaint and as she rose to greet the audience as the new Lady of House Archne, holder of fortune and favor of the Red, she might as well have been taking a protracted bow at music's end. The sacrifices, one and all, had been made. Reward was well paid.
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The doppleganger corpses of Onion and Cedric, for their parts, would travel to just outside the Archne district, to Center City. At the once marsh delta that met at the gates of the thirteen garden kingdoms of ancient Eirdred plains lie Center City. In the old days, it had been leveled and filled in practically every generation, and washed away again before the children of that generation had a chance to lie in their graves.

But the engineering prowess of Heilth changed that. The dams, bridges and tunnels they had built upon the marsh turned the land that belonged to no district into permanent dwellings for the Eirdren. Then, as now, travel between districts had always been feasible since the unification and the signing of the Red. Though now Center City was a town in its own right, the Heilthians never altered the bisecting highway that traversed the old marsh. No soul could exit the city, encapsulated by shear sandstone outer walls as it was, without leaving through Center City. From any district, a traveler would have to traverse the broad brick laden streets to the main gates that lined Center City.

Once there they would have to navigate a confusing maze of shops, stalls and apartments that had grown organically as the district populations exploded beyond their enclosures. By the time he reached the plains facing River Road or the coastal South Shore Highway, a naive traveler could expect to have become the proud owner of numerous baubles and trinkets he never knew he needed. Today, Center City was a place of administration, the hand of Heilthian law, but most importantly, Center City was the main commercial hub of all thirteen districts of Eirdred City.