Beck's Guard pt. 4

          He took a step forward, beyond the pile of rot he took to be the door to Camains ancient armory, and a second, glass paneled door slid from the entrance. He was beyond surprises, but wondered what such was for. The way was clear.
         The light didn’t just come from the ceiling. The walls themselves seemed to be alive with it. White panels broke the seamless wall. Behind those, that same flicker that came from the round glass tubes above. In between the glowing panels, green marble pylons, polished green marble, with a sheen so bright Teige could see his face reflected back at him, rose to high buttresses of flowing gold script. White azure swirled in the dark depths. Gold etching stained the walls and floor in decoration where they met. The bulbs above should have been covered, reflecting (mimicking, his warrior mind called) the glow of the walls. Over time the panels must have fallen and broken, or been removed to better the lighting.
         The floor had once been the same as that in the rooms beyond, red and green porcelain, but was now covered in a thick matting of scars.
         Shelves here also then, but long removed . The gold bar must have been simply been too bulky, so instead had been stacked away.
         It littered the corners, stacked in heaps and oblong piles, now an almost useless substance. At one time it had held great worth, so the council’s books would have you believe. It was a useless potmetal. A pretty decoration, but no more. It was worthless for the making of weapons. Too soft and flexible for the protection of armor. And even the jewelry it produced was gaudy, sparkly and rich with texture, but easily marred. Teige had never been one for adornment.
         Besides, it wasn’t the gold that interested Teige. It wasn’t the hard black shapes of artillery that lined each wall to his left and right, or the boxes of small round egg shaped devices that waited in great quantity over the floor. It wasn’t even the wonders, the magics, the fatum of a time long past. There was no time for those now. Maybe never again.
         It was the distant wall. The shrine that waited there. The answers it held. And the legacy of his grandfather.
         He removed an odd shaped black weapon, what might have been a scatter rifle except for the second barrel, twice as large and centered directly below the first, and turned, placing it between the lower halves of he door jam and smacking down on it as hard as his foot would allow, before he moved forward.
         No chances, that’s what his mind was telling him. Besides that, Times up!
         He could have used the guns, him and his men both. The odds of them figuring out how to use them were good. They weren’t that dissimilar from the service rifles they were allowed at state affairs. But Teige also knew they were impractical, they jammed, and there was no way to get them beyond these walls by himself. They would have to deal with what dangers awaited them in what ways they could.
         The hall was short. Still large, but nothing compared to that room beyond. The boxes here were stacked in clean, clear piles. Dust was everywhere, but not in great quantity. Perhaps the second door acted as some kind of barrier, to keep the weapons safe and dry. What was carried in was only that which came by way of intruders. It made Teige proud, that someone, somewhere in time had thought to put these here for safe keeping, rather than is some dark room in the halls above where they would have gone to rust. These would be needed, and soon, whether Roswald, the Council, Charp, or the entire city cared to admit it or not. For now at least, he would protect them the best he was able. His mind wouldn’t allow him to think beyond that point. Plan to far ahead and you forget the here and now, the words of Tel, his first year drill sergeant called out to him. Plan to far ahead and your liable to find it lying in your lap. Advice he had heeded time and time again. Advice that had kept him alive for more than twenty years.
         At the south end of the room, having entered from the north, waited the Shrine. That’s what the soldiers called it, that is what it had been named since time immemorial. It wasn’t a statue, or a carving, or a cheap fountain like the council might have constructed for fallen heroes after a particularly bad onslaught at the borders. It was nothing so spectacular as gold and ivory, or even silver. It wasn’t a wonder of man. It was a soldiers wonder. It was what every man, every boy, who grew to adulthood to serve in The Guard, hopes for. It was a wall. Plain black granite. And upon it were carved names. The names of Camains heroes, it’s founders, it’s warriors.
         Teige no longer thought of being captured as he walked the breadth of the room. He no longer thought much of anything. Except to touch the coarse black stone. Without thinking or knowing how it came to be, he found his fingers tracing the cold, curt edging of names. They weren’t listed in order, alphabetical or otherwise. But in battles. The largest, more than a thousand years before, consumed one entire side of the stone. It was there that Teige found his last name Beck, Arthur. Gunnery Sgt. 2nd brigade. No.1104 Tombstone, Arizona. Each side, each war, each victory and every loss, for a thousand years claimed a descendant of his line.
         And now that line ended. Teige felt the subject close with the finality of a tomb. In his mind the stone coffer echoed dryly. There would be no children for Teige. He was incapable. Had he been, he would not have wished such on any woman. His line died with him. That was the way it must be.
         Teige might have cried, but it was not the soldiers way.
         At the base of the shrine waited a long black case etched in silver. A glass lid showed it’s contents glistening in the light.
         Black.
         Oiled.
         Seamless belts glistened softly, a sparkle of copper escaping each casing that lines it’s length. The holsters were empty. Beside them, in a soft bed of black velvet, they rested.
         His fathers—
         Grandfathers—
         Great Grandfathers—
         Great great—
         and on and on through history as far as any man could remember. Teige had never seen them, but knew them for what they were all the same. His birthright. Passed down to him through a thousand generations and beyond. Beyond this pitiful world and back into the old.
         Teige had no key, so he smashed the glass lid with the butt of his elbow. The sound was quiet, as though the room itself did not wish the sacrilege to be heard. He sought the belts, sought the weapons they were meant to hold, and sought the plain steel tags that rested to their side, held by a chain of small silver pearls.
         Heart skipping a beat, another, he strapped the warm leather across his waste, strapping them low, crisscrossing the buckles so that they hung low on each hip. Teige had held guns before, but nothing so well balanced, nothing so pure, as these. They were small, not much larger than a big mans fist, and Teige could tell immediately such craftsmen ship had gone form the world. If ever a time had been in the first. The weapons said it was so, his mind told him it was not.
         They nestled perfectly in the holsters, secured in place by a wide strap that clicked over a silver bezel.
         The chains were his. If not by name, by birthright. Of every line that crossed from the old world and into this next, his was the only to have survived. No one but himself could trace their way back to the beginning, or the end as some might see it. No one.
         If Teige was to die, he intended to take with him that which had brought him here in the first place. Fools or erants, Camain was his city, it’s people his people. He would do what he could for them, no matter what the cost. He would die knowing he had done his best. And when his eyes last closed, to open nevermore, he would meet the man who had fathered a line, who had survived the great war, who had founded an empire, and he would return to him that which was his. And he would love him.
         Teige turned,

         — and fled.