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phroyd · 6 years ago

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WASHINGTON — Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, has been ordered to serve a total of seven and a half years in prison after a second federal judge added more time to his sentence on Wednesday, saying he “spent a significant portion of his career gaming the system.”

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Federal District Court in Washington sentenced Mr. Manafort, 69, on two conspiracy counts that encompassed a host of crimes, including money-laundering, obstruction of justice and failing to disclose lobbying work that earned him tens of millions of dollars over more than a decade.

“It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the amount of money involved,” she said, reeling off Mr. Manafort’s various offenses, rapid-fire. “There is no question that this defendant knew better and he knew what he was doing.”

Each charge carried a maximum of five years. But Judge Jackson noted that one count was closely tied to the same bank and tax fraud scheme that a federal judge in Virginia had sentenced Mr. Manafort for last week. Under sentencing guidelines, she said, those punishments should largely overlap, not be piled on top of each other. Mr. Manafort was also expected to get credit for the nine months he has already spent in jail.

Soon after the additional sentence was handed down, Mr. Manafort was charged in state court in New York with mortgage fraud and more than a dozen other felonies, an effort to ensure he will still face prison time if Mr. Trump pardons him for his federal crimes.

Mr. Manafort asked the judge in Washington not to add to his time in prison. “This case has taken everything from me, already,” he said, running through a list of his financial assets that now belong to the government. “Please let my wife and I be together,” he added, hunched over in a wheelchair because of a flare-up of gout.

Mr. Manafort’s lawyer Kevin Downing told the judge that while he was not accusing the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, of mounting a politically motivated prosecution, “but for a short stint as campaign manager in a national election, I don’t think we would be here today.”

But the judge firmly rejected the argument that the prosecution was somehow “misguided or invalid,” saying it showed Mr. Manafort did not fully accept responsibility for his crimes. She suggested that defense lawyers kept repeating it not because they hoped to influence her thinking, but “for some other audience” — an apparent reference to Mr. Trump, who has commented repeatedly on the Manafort case.

Andrew Weissmann, one of Mr. Mueller’s top deputies, said Mr. Manafort had squandered his education and a wealth of opportunities to lead a criminal conspiracy for more than a decade. Once caught, he obstructed justice by tampering with two witnesses, he said, and then repeatedly lied to prosecutors and to a grand jury after he agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s office in September.

“He served to undermine — not promote — American ideals of honesty, transparency and playing by the rules,” Mr. Weissmann said.

Mr. Manafort’s case stood out in many ways, not the least of which is because it was brought by the special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. It is also rare that the government reaches a plea deal and then pulls out, claiming that the defendant has deceived them instead of cooperating.

Judge Jackson ruled earlier that Mr. Manafort breached his plea agreement by lying, but prosecutors have not publicly disclosed why they consider those lies important, saying they wanted to protect an open investigation. That was expected to make it harder for Judge Jackson, who takes pride in explaining herself in terms that ordinary people can understand, to describe how she arrived at her sentence.

In another oddity, Mr. Manafort’s prosecution was divided into two cases — the one before Judge Jackson, and the related case overseen by Judge T. S. Ellis III of Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va. Last week, Judge Ellis sentenced Mr. Manafort to 47 months in prison for eight felony counts of tax evasion, bank fraud and failure to disclose a foreign bank account.

Six Trump advisers or officials have been charged by the special counsel.

Judge Ellis’s sentence set off a firestorm of criticism from commentators who complained it was overly lenient for a defendant who had orchestrated a multimillion-dollar fraud over a decade. Much of the legal world considered the sentencing guidelines in the Virginia case, which called for a prison term of 19 to 24 years, far too harsh. But some public defenders and former prosecutors said a 47-month sentence exemplified the sentencing disparities in a criminal justice system that favors wealthy, white-collar criminals.

Instead, some predicted, she would most likely allow Mr. Manafort to serve his sentences simultaneously, which would cap his prison term at 10 years.

“What is happening today is not and cannot be a review and a revision by a sentence imposed by another court,” Judge Jackson said on Wednesday, referring to the sentence Mr. Manafort received last week.

Hanging over the entire case has been the chance that Mr. Trump could pardon Mr. Manafort. Asked about that possibility, Mr. Trump’s answers have varied. He said late last year that he “wouldn’t take it off the table.” More recently, he said, “I don’t even discuss it.”

Asked about a pardon on Monday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said, “The president has made his position on that clear, and he’ll make a decision when he is ready.”

Last June, when Judge Jackson revoked Mr. Manafort’s bail and sent him to jail after prosecutors filed new charges of witness tampering, President Trump said Mr. Manafort was being treated like a mafia boss.

“Who was treated worse, Alfonse Capone, legendary mob boss, killer and ‘Public Enemy Number One,’ or Paul Manafort, political operative & Reagan/Dole darling, now serving solitary confinement — although convicted of nothing?” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter.

State prosecutors in Manhattan are said to be preparing charges against Mr. Manafort to help ensure he will serve prison time even if Mr. Trump pardons him for his federal crimes.

Judge Jackson is comfortable with complex decisions, said Robert P. Trout, a defense lawyer who runs the law firm where she worked for a decade before President Barack Obama appointed her to the bench in 2011. “If anyone can get their head around the complexities and sensibilities of the sentencing considerations in play here, it is Judge Jackson,” Mr. Trout said.

The special counsel has not requested a specific sentence in any criminal case it has brought. In the case before Judge Jackson, prosecutors said that Mr. Manafort had “repeatedly and brazenly” violated a host of laws and did not deserve any breaks. Even though sentencing guidelines recommended a prison term of up to 22 years, the maximum sentence was governed by the statutes, not the guidelines, and so was limited to 10 years.

The judge sentenced Mr. Manafort to five years on the first conspiracy count, but said 30 months of that would be served concurrently with the Virginia sentence because of the overlap between the two cases. On the second conspiracy count, which involved obstruction of justice, she sentenced him to 13 months, saying that his efforts to influence witnesses had “largely been nipped in the bud.”

Judge Jackson tends to be relatively lenient on convicted criminals who appear before her. In the five years that ended in 2017, she handed down an average prison sentence of just 32 months, below both the Washington district’s 46-month average and the nationwide average of 47 months, according to court data maintained by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

But Judge Jackson has gone out of her way to make clear that being well-connected earns no chits in her court. “She knows who commits white-collar crime,” said Heather Shaner, a Washington lawyer who represented an embezzler in her court. “And she thinks it’s perfectly fine to punish them if they commit a crime and hold them to a higher standard because they have the education, and because they have the wealth.”

Six years ago, she sentenced the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Jr., the former Illinois congressman and son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, to 30 months in prison for stealing $750,000 from his campaign to pay personal expenses. He had asked for probation. But she told him: “How would I explain a probationary sentence to those troubled youths who are locked up, who didn’t start where you started, and were not given what you were given?

“It would be read one way and one way only, as a clear statement that there are two systems of justice: one for the well-connected, and one for everyone else,” she added. “I cannot do it. I will not do it.”

Phroyd

#justice department

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dcreed013 · 8 years ago

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Chapter 3: The Grimoire

Ellie woke that morning to the sound of a bird calling directly above her. She stared at the ring of early morning sky for awhile, disoriented. Then yesterday’s events began to replay and slowly sank back into her, and her stomach felt heavier as she recalled that she was still a ways from home.

She turned her head and glanced over to her right to spot her new companion, Chevias. He was still asleep, his back to her and his tail lying twisted in the dirt like a huge snake. The tail twitched occasionally and Ellie was once again amazed and slightly alarmed at how bizarrely quite Chevias was. Thanks to her father and older brothers, she had been under the impression that all men’s snoring sounded like wild animal growls or saws going thorough wood. But Chevias’ snore was so quiet and soft that it was almost indistinguishable from the rustling of the leaves in the trees above her. She was half convinced he wasn’t actually sleeping, but his lack of response when she softly called his name proved he was.

Ellie got the distinct feeling that walking over to him and shaking him awake would result in her being smacked across the clearing , so instead she sat up and tossed a rock near him. It clacked loudly on another rock near his head, and the witch bolted upright with a startled and sleepy mumble. He came to his senses with amazing speed, considering Ellie had spent about five minutes groggily staring at the sky, and looked over at her.

“Oh right…morning.”

“Good morning….”

Chevias yawned loudly and started stretching, reminding Ellie of the old cats in Flatrend. Ellie tried to get up and was met with a sharp pain in her back and aches in her legs. Chevias noticed her rubbing at her back, “Stiff back? Sleeping on the ground’ll do that. Try twisting and popping it, like this.” He demonstrated and Ellie copied him, flinching in horror as her back made a series of loud popping sounds. However, it did help the pain, and Ellie was able to stand up and look around.

The fire pit in the middle was now just ashes, the smell of smoke still hanging in the air. She looked down at herself and found that the bright yellow of her dress was getting dull with dirt. ‘Just as well,’ she supposed, ‘it was annoyingly bright anyway.’

Chevias was nice enough to let Ellie have some of the water from his waterskin, though it was made of some hard metal and he called it a canteen. She shared some of her bread and cheese the old woman had given her for breakfast, and the two made their way back to the main road to continue their trip.

This walk was much like the yesterdays, though there was less terrified silence on Ellie’s part. They talked for most of the way, but this time Ellie found that Chevias was less willing to talk about himself, to her annoyance and frustration. Ellie was extremely curious about witches, but whenever Ellie asked him a question about him or witches, he would either flip it around to ask about her or smoothly change the subject.

“So, what’s your family like?”

“Oh, what you’d expect. What about yours?”

The chat had been going on in this fashion for a while and at this point, Ellie was quite annoyed with his suddenly suspicious behavior. She put her hands on her hips and huffed, “Alright, why are you acting strange? You were so chatty yesterday, and now you’re dodging my questions!”

He looked a little caught off guard by Ellie’s directness, “What? I’m not dodging.”

“Yes you are!”

He sighed and paused for a moment, thinking about something, before replying. “Ok, look Ellie. The fact of the matter is, part of my job includes keeping my mouth closed about it. Apparently, the higher ups aren’t comfortable with people knowing a lot about witches, so they tell us that the most important part is to keep quiet and not cause any scenes. An annoyingly big part of our training is keeping up conversations while being what they call ‘diplomatic’.” He put that last word in air quotes.

“What they really mean is that they don’t want non-witches in witch business, so they train us to shut our yaps about it.”

Ellie was incredulous about this, “But what about that big story yesterday?”

“I’m allowed to tell people what I’m doing, not why I’m doing it. Plus, you were jumping at shadows yesterday. Let’s just say there’s a big, long list of subjects that are a no-no, ok?”

“Talking about your family is a no-no?”

He raised an eyebrow at her, but stayed silent.

“Right, no-no. Well then, can you just tell me if you’re not allowed to talk about a subject instead of jumping over it? This is all sounding really suspicious.”

He sighed again, sounding exasperated, “Yeah, I know it does. I’ve told my boss a big part of why people don’t like witches is how shady we’re told to act. But she just-” he cut himself off.

“…No-no?”

“Yup, yeah, that was a no-no. Say, why don’t you tell me about your family now, before I start running my mouth again?”

So Ellie talked about her family for a long while. She talked about Wormwood farm’s history, about the dragon scale roof, and about town. She found that talking about her life was a far more productive course of conversation than Chevias’. It seemed every time she ventured to ask about his personal life, he had to shut her down for it being against the rules.

Ellie couldn’t fathom why his ‘higher ups’ were against him talking about his parents or school, or even about where he lives on the occasions he’s not traveling. She didn’t know how they would know if he did talk about them, but when she voiced this question, he just shook his head again. It was quite frustrating, so instead of trying to pry information out of him, she buried her curiosity and tried to focus on chatting about the other kids in town and how big a deal the adult made of the school teacher’s alleged affair with the butcher.

“I’m actually not really sure what an ‘affair’ is, but it must be something really terrible for the adults to almost kick them out of town over it. Do know what it is Chevias?”

He had seemed to be amused by the small town gossip, but Ellie was surprised by how loud he laughed at that question. His laugh was sharp and barking, and surprisingly shrill compared to his normal voice. He quickly reigned himself in and chuckled, “That’s something for your parents to tell you, not me. So, did they get kicked out?”

As a matter a fact, they hadn’t. Ellie hadn’t been there to hear it, but apparently there had been a big commotion in the square one afternoon while she was helping her brothers fix the henhouse roof. After that incident, the townspeople stopped pestering the teacher as much and instead focused on the teenage son of a merchant who lived in town. She relayed this to Chevias.

“Why’d they do that?”

Ellie shrugged, “I kept hearing different stories. Harriet Row told me that he made a mess of the statue in the middle of town, but Eddy Warthren said he’d harassed a lady and had a fight with her husband. Then Sarah Trout said he’d set off some kind of explosion, Trevor Grove said he won a duel to the death in the square, and Patrick Morton said that he’d let a bunch of wild cat’s loose on a fish merchant! By the time I heard about it, there were a thousand different stories!”

“You couldn’t just ask someone who was there?”

Ellie threw up her hands, “You think I didn’t try that? Every time I asked someone who supposedly saw it, they’d just brush me off and say ‘never mind all that’!”

Ellie was surprised she could talk about her town so much. She had always been under the impression that Flatrend was a boring place where not much of note happened. But every time she thought she’d exhausted a thread of conversation, she remembered another funny or odd thing that happened. She had also been worried that Chevias would quickly get bored of the silly nonsense and stop paying attention to it, but she found that either he was genuinely interested in the goings on of a small town, or he was just an excellent listener. Anyone else she knew would’ve tuned out long ago.

As she recounted the tale of when a horde of the town’s troublemaking kids had plucked a bunch her family’s chickens so they could tar and feather the statue in town square, Chevias stopped walking abruptly and interrupted.

“Hey, we’re almost there.”

She stopped next to him, “Almost where? I don’t see the town.”

Indeed, it had been several hours, but they were still far from town. Chevias pointed over to the right side of the road, “This is the turn off for where I’m going. It’s a bit of a detour, but there’s a way to get to Tyman from there to.” He paused a bit, “This way might even be safer than the main road.”

He started heading for the edge of the forest before looking back at her, “Last chance to change your mind. Are you coming or not?”

“I’m coming, I’m coming!”

Ellie dashed after him and followed him off the road. Unlike the path to the clearing, which had been completely hidden aside from the scratches of Witch-Speak on the trees, this path was marked by nothing more than a thin deer trail. Ellie had a bit of trouble pushing through the thick brush, but Chevias seemed to know the path down to each step to take.

“So where are we going?”

“To a small, unnamed lake. It shouldn’t be far. I was told it was about a ten minute walk from the road.”

“You were told? You mean you’ve never been there before?!”

“No, not to this place specifically. Don’t worry, I know where I’m going. I don’t get lost.”

His confidence made Ellie want to believe him, but she wasn’t entirely certain anyone could keep they’re bearings in the forest like this. If it wasn’t for the barely-there deer trail, she wouldn’t have known if they were going straight or in circles.

After a few minutes of walking deeper into the forest, doubt started to creep up from the recesses of her mind. The darkness of the foliage and the stiff air were causing her mind to swing back to the anxiety that had been waiting to resurface. ‘Idiot,’ a voice told her, ‘you’re an idiot! You should’ve waved goodbye to him back on the road and made your merry way to Tyman. But nooo, you decided to put your faith in a witch! You let one of the most notoriously untrustworthy creatures in all of creation lead you off the road and to Thia knows where!’

‘Chevias has been nothing but nice and helpful,’ Ellie argued with the voice. ‘Yes he’s a little suspicious, but if he’s not allowed to talk about things, then I should respect that. Besides, he didn’t force me to follow him! I had every opportunity to go on without him!’

‘Then why didn’t you?!’

Ellie wrestled with her doubt for a long time, not even noticing that she was making a very troubled face that Chevias could clearly see. He didn’t try to snap her out of it though. If anything, he found the fact that everything she thought showed on her face rather funny.

So he didn’t bother her fight with her inner turmoil until they finally reached the lake. He had to reach out and grab her shoulder to keep her from walking right into it.

“Ah!” The feeling of his hand brought her back to reality quickly.

“Watch out. It’s a steep drop down.”

So it was. Ellie looked around at the strange lake. If you could call it a lake, that is. It was almost perfectly round, and about ten feet in diameter. The water in it was a murky green from algae and lily pads, and the bottom of it was completely obscured so you couldn’t tell how deep it was. It had less of a bank than a steep drop into the dark water. It had no sign of a creek or stream running through it. It looked more like a man-made pond than something you’d find in the middle of a forest. “Chevias, you said we were going to a lake. This doesn’t look like a lake.”

He scratched his head, a little puzzled, “Yeah, it does. Errol told me it was a lake, so I thought it’d be bigger.” He started digging through his bag and mumbled, “Though I suppose it is a lake for someone his size.”

“What?”

“Anyways, this is defiantly it. Look here.” He walked over to and crouched beside a rock that was sitting besides the pond. Ellie joined him to see that the rock had some now familiar looking scratches. Below the scratches and taking up the majority of the rock was peculiar handprint with only four digits; the thumb and three fingers.

“What’s this?”

“The entrance.”

Chevias finally pulled what he’d been looking for out of his bag. It was a slim book with a silvery, metallic-looking cover. Ellie looked at it with wide eyes. “What’s that?”

He smiled, “This is a grimoire. Can’t tell you more than that though. Sorry.”

Ellie pouted as he opened the book to reveal…blank pages. The pages of the book were a little odd, but she couldn’t quite figure out what it was about them that was strange. She raised her brow, “It’s blank.”

“Yup.”

Chevias ran his finger down the center of the book and, to Ellie’s shock and amazement, the book lit up with bright green lettering. She gasped as the green light crisscrossed into Witch-Speak across the pages. Then, as she watched, Chevias gave the book a command. He only said one word, and she would bet it was in Witch-Speak because she’d never heard anything like it.

“What are you doing?”

“Can’t tell.”

She huffed, “So you can do whatever this is right in front of my face, but you can’t tell me what it is?”

“Yeah, that’s how it works.”

“That’s stupid. These are stupid rules.”

“They are, but I still have to follow them. Now pipe down.”

She didn’t know what it was he told the book to do, but the characters on the book pages flashed and changed, settling into a single line of letters. Chevias tapped those letters with his finger and then the pages once again filled up with Witch-Speak. Chevias gave another command and the letters flashed and changed once more. This time he took the time to read what was on the page instead of poking at it.

“Ok…ok, simple enough. Easy.”

He reached over to the stone and placed his hand over the print, pressing his pinky and ring finger together so they’d fit into the groove made for one. After settling it into the indent, he glanced back over at Ellie, “Stand back, ok?”

She obeyed and hopped away from him as he looked back at the book and read aloud from it. He rattled off a string of Witch-Speak that sent a chill up Ellie’s spine. From the snippets he’d said, she could gather that Witch-Speak was a language mostly comprised of hard constantan sounds and lots of ‘sh’ noises. It wasn’t a pretty sounding language, like Runic or Hedeshoi. It was slithering and clicking, harsh and sharp, like the lettering that matched it.

As the last syllable left Chevias’ tongue, the scratching above the hand print started to glow the same green as the grimoire, and the ground trembled a bit as the sound of rushing water filled Ellie’s ears. She looked back at the pond to see that the murky water was draining from the pond at a startling rate, disappearing within a few minutes.

Ellie peered into the now empty hole in the ground, astounded, as Chevias stood up. She saw that the muddy water had been concealing the fact that the pond was quite deep; a little deeper than Chevias was tall. “Well, that’ll do. Come on.”

She gaped at him, “Come? Come where?”

Then he hopped down in the hole and landed without slipping on the slimy pond scum and vegetation that had sunk to the bottom. He turned back to her and held out his arms, “Come on down, I’ll catch you.”

The look on her face told him what she thought of that.

“Don’t worry, I won’t drop you. Unless you’d rather try to come down yourself.”

Ellie was always a little frightened by heights, as her father can attest from when he tried to put her on his shoulders. Although the drop wasn’t terribly high, it was still a little under six feet. Ellie was a rather small for her age, and she only came up to about the bottom of Chevias’ ribcage. She looked for another option but found that the walls of the pond were made of a smooth stone; it was defiantly manmade. With no way to climb down, she sighed and steeled herself.

She dropped off the edge and quickly landed in Chevias’ arms, who barely dipped down under her weight. She didn’t know if she should be surprised by how strong his arms felt considering how skinny he was, or not at all considering she watched him drag a bear off the road.

Either way, he set her down on her feet quickly. “Alright, start kinda shifting all the debris around. There should be a hatch door on the floor.”

It wasn’t one minute before Ellie tripped over it. She would’ve landed with her face in the algae if Chevias hadn’t lashed his tail out and caught her by the waist with it. His tail was as thin and flexible as a length of rope and just as solid and steady under her weight as his arms. She was genuinely creeped out by it, only able to remember a picture of a snake squeezing the life out of its prey she’d once seen in a book, but sputtered a thank you as he uncoiled it from her and walked closer to see the door.

He crouched down and wiped the debris off it, revealing a metal door with no visible handle, knob, or hinges. Instead, there was only another one of those strange handprints on the center of it within a circle of Witch-Speak. Chevias opened like he drained the pond; he put his hand on it and read a line from the grimoire. This time, it wasn’t as responsive. The letters flickered a bit, as though trying to obey him, but having trouble doing so.

“Come on you piece of….” He muttered and banged on the hatch. The lights blinked on and stayed steady as a soft whirring noise sounded, and the door swung up and opened by itself. It revealed a hole going down with ladder rungs protruding from one side. Ellie peered down and could see that there was a landing not too far down that lead to a narrow corridor that sloped down into darkness.

“What in Thia’s name IS all this?”

Chevias was already starting to climb down the ladder rungs, “It’s an old bunker. Two-hundred years or so ago we built hidden bunkers like this to house soldiers for the war. They’re scattered around, but most of them have been forgotten. Records of this one were only recently dug up.”

Ellie started down the ladder after him, “I’ve never heard of anything like this!”

“I’d be surprised if you did. I didn’t think there was any this far west, but I guess they managed to scrap this one together right before the tables turned.”

“Wait, is it ok for me to be here?” As she asked this, Ellie reached the bottom of the ladder and stepped onto the landing, squinting into the darkness to see what looked like entryways lining the walls of the hallway.

Chevias nodded, “Yeah, it should be fine. It’s not like it’s a secret that places like this exist. There’s one over in Ovanhagen that’s been converted into a kind of museum.”

Chevias reached over to the wall beside him and firmly placed his hand on some kind of panel, and then the dark gloom of the bunker was alleviated by a red glow from the rooms lining the halls that spilled through the doorways. The whirring noise sounded again and Ellie looked back up to see that the trapdoor was closing on its own. As it shut, there was a faint but strange sound that a little like wheezing that was followed by the muffled sound of running water. Now that the door was closed, the pond was refilling.

Chevias started walking down the path and Ellie hesitated a moment before following him. The corridor was just wide enough for two adults to walk abreast, and was oddly sloping downwards, but the rooms were level, as Ellie saw when she passed the nearest one. The rooms were huge and filled with dusty looking beds. The bedding was mostly tattered cloths and what looked like rolled up clothes for pillows. The red light shone from a huge plate in the ceiling, strangely bright and vivid and cast deep shadows across this gloomy, forgotten place.

Each door had scratching of Witch-Speak above them that also glowed that menacing red. She wasn’t entirely certain, but Ellie could guess that they denoted what kind of room was below them. As they descended, they passed one set of what she assumed were barracks after another, until finally the hall leveled out. Ellie had no idea how deep underground they were, but the mere thought of it was about to give her a bout of claustrophobia.

To combat the panic that was welling up in her chest, she started talking again. “Chevias, why are the lights red here?” She had expected her voice to echo, but the echo she got was far louder and creepier than what she expected. Her voice reverberated for a full minute before finally dissipating.

“Red light is easy on the eyes. If someone stumbled in here at night, they wouldn’t be totally blinded by it.”

“Oh…well, umm…can you tell me what happened here?”

Chevias glanced at her before quickly looking away, his face hard as the stone around them. “I know rural towns don’t have the best schools, but I know they teach you that much.”

Ellie gulped and cowered at his sharp tone, falling a few steps behind him, “Sorry.”

“Ellie, for future reference, NEVER bring that up around a witch. Some are a lot more sensitive about it than others.”

“I’m sorry…I really don’t know exactly what happened though. They’ve taught me about the Great War and before, but they always skip what came after. Whenever I ask about it, the adults tell me that it’s something complicated and that they’ll tell me when I’m older.” She wrung her hands nervously, trying to keep her voice from trembling, “…It must have been something really bad though…I can tell.”

Chevias sighed, “I guess that makes sense. You’re still a kid after all….” He stopped and turned to her suddenly, startling her. “Listen, when they do teach you about it, they’re probably gonna tell you a lot of…” he trailed off, looking for the right wording. “Well…just keep in mind that every story has two sides, ok?”

Ellie wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, but nodded anyway. She guessed it would make sense when she was older. As much as that notion annoyed her, right now she just wanted this uncomfortable conversation to end. Asking about the time after the Great War had clearly been a mistake; the stale air in this bunker was almost suffocating with tension and Ellie was wishing she’d kept her mouth shut.

Chevias spun around and started down the hall again, “Sorry if I scared you. Come on, we’re almost there.”

She didn’t bother asking where exactly ‘there’ was, but followed him silently. The idea that maybe she should’ve parted ways with him back on the road flittered through her mind again, and not for the last time.

It was about another five minutes of awkward and silent walking before they finally reached something other than barracks. The right side of the hallway suddenly gave way to a gigantic room and the left side was adorned with the only actual door they’d seen down here. The door was wooden and had a glass window at the top of it, but it was oddly opaque and dappled looking. Both had more glowing Witch-Speak to their sides, and the giant room was lit by another plate of crimson, this one enormous. It was full of tables and chairs, with what looked like in the gloom long counters towards the back.

Chevias spoke up, “That must’ve been the cafeteria. And that’s the main office. Come on, we’re going to the-“

A long, loud grumbling sound interrupted him and Ellie grabbed at her stomach, her face heating up.

Chevias was clearly trying his best not to laugh in her face, “Pfft…yeah, it is about noon, isn’t it? We can sit down and eat first.”

He walked over to the table nearest to the entrance and pulled out a chair. He frowned at the tabletop and swept his arm over it, sending a cascade of dust flying to the ground.

Ellie delicately walked over, looking cautiously around the room. As hungry as she was, the idea of eating in this tomb was intimidating. The idea of the shadows leaping at her didn’t seem so silly here, and she wondered how the soldiers that were once quarted here could stand it. Even so, she forced herself to sit at the still somewhat dusty table across from Chevias and pulled the last of her bread and cheese out of her basket. “The lady only gave me enough for myself, so there’s not much left….”

“That’s ok. I’ve got…” he rooted around in his bag, “…jerky!” He pulled a small bag filled with sticks of dried meat out. Combining that with the bread and cheese made for a decent meal, and Ellie stuffed down all she could get.

“Take it easy Ellie. We’ll be in Tyman by tonight and we can get dinner at an inn, ok?”

She swallowed her last bite of bread, “Speaking of which, what will we do about food for the way to Flatrend?”

“I’ll spot you a bag in town so you can carry some things-”

“I-!”

“Don’t argue. We’ll buy some provisions the morning after we get there. We’ll spend the next night to rest and head out the next morning. If we can get someone to give us a ride, we’ll do that. But we have to be prepared if no one wants to. Then we’ll make our way and I’ll hunt for dinner most nights. Sound like a plan?”

“It does…I suppose….” Ellie wasn’t too happy about having to spend an extra night in Tyman, but she supposed it was necessary for the long walk ahead of them.

“…Wait Chevias, you’re going to pay for all this? Do you even have the money?” Ellie recalled his story about being stranded in Weshan because his employers gave him the bare minimum, so how could he have enough to pay for all this?

At first she expected him to say that he wasn’t allowed to tell her, but he responded with, “You remember that I had a run in with goblins last night? Well,” he pulled a very fat and bloodstained coin purse out of his bag, looking a bit smug. “This should cover it.”

It was the fattest bag of coins she’d ever seen, and she was a bit impressed that a band of goblins managed to get a hold of that much. “Yeah, that should work. But can I ask you something I’ve always wondered? What do goblins need with money anyway? I always hear about how they steal things and raid towns, but I’ve never heard about one actually using the money they steal.”

Chevias shrugged, “I don’t know, I’ve wondered the same thing myself. They’re not smart enough to use it for anything and no one would sell to a goblin even if they tried bartering. Maybe they’re just dumb.”

He laughed and pocketed the purse again, “On the bright side, if I’m ever strapped for cash I can just find some goblins. Even a little group of them is bound to have some money on them, and they’re not hard to find.”

True enough, but the way she was sure Chevias took the money from them made Ellie pity goblins, even if just a bit. He gave the impression that he didn’t care for goblins enough to give them a chance to run, and she was glad she wasn’t in their position.

‘Not that that’s my business. I’ve never actually met any goblins, but I’ve heard they’re nasty creatures. He’s probably doing the kingdom a big favor by getting rid of them.’

Chevias tucked away the rest of the jerky and stood from his chair, “Alright, let’s get moving. The sooner we’re out of here the better.” Ellie couldn’t have agreed with that statement more and stood up with him. They reentered the hallway and Chevias walked over to the door he had earlier identified as an office. He put his hand on the panel next to the door that was much like the one that turned on the lights.

The panel flashed red and gave five long, annoying sounding beeps, then did nothing.

Chevias growled, “Uggghhh…” Then he grumbled something in Witch-Speak that Ellie was ninety percent certain was a swear.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s only supposed to open for authorized personnel. Stand back, I’m going to bust it open.”

She jumped a few feet away, “How?”

He hesitated with his hand on the door, “…Ok, I’m gonna do something, but freak out, ok? It’s totally normal and I’m not going to hurt you.”

Ellie wasn’t sure what to say to that. She was sure that he was about to open the door the same way he killed the bear, the goblins, and skinned last night’s dinner. Last night she had been scared of him enough to not want to know, but now her curiosity far outweighed that. So she nodded, “Ok, I won’t.”

“Alright. Just stay back; I don’t want any glass hitting you.”

Ellie stared at him intently, waiting for him to do something odd. She waited a moment and nothing seemed to happen. He just stood there, his shoulders and tail stiff as he expected her to start screaming. She flicked her eyes down and up, then down again as she finally saw what had changed.

What had been Chevias’ oddly pale, but otherwise perfectly normal hands had been replaced. Now they were pitch black, and each finger had been replaced by a long, sharp looking claw. Ellie’s breath hitched and a squeak escaped her throat.

“It’s ok!” Chevias held up his new hands, “This is just something I can do! Please don’t scream, the echoes in here are bad enough at normal volume!”

Ellie let out her breath and forced herself to suck in one after another to prevent a scream, “Ok, I’m alright. W-what exactly is that?”

He waved his hand and Ellie could swear she heard the faintest sound of splitting air as the knife-like claws swept through the air. “They’re my hands.”

“I can see that, but happened to them?!”

“It’s just something I can do. It’s as normal for me as being able to walk is to you.”

“Can…can all witches do that? I’ve never heard that witches could do that.”

Chevias sighed and put his hands on his hips, rolling his eyes.

“You can’t tell me? Fine…just-just open the door already. I want to get out of here.”

“Alright,” he turned around to face the door, “you know, you took that better than a lot of people have. Once time a grown man ran away from me screaming after I saved his life and a kid your age fainted. You’re pretty level headed for your age.”

“Thank you...?”

Chevias reared his clawed hands back, “Shade your eyes, you don’t want any splinters flying in them.” Then he started to hack through the thick wooden door, his claws slicing through it like it was made of butter. Ellie had seen her dad chop fire wood before and not even the sharpest, most well made axe money could buy would cut through solid wood as cleanly and easily as those claws. In fact, chopping and cutting weren’t the right words for it; the claws were gliding right through it, so sharp that the wood wasn’t resisting them at all. Ellie could only stare wide eyed and wonder just what all those blades could cut through.

Chevias finished cutting a large hole out of the middle of the door, and stepped back to look at it, “Yup, that outta do it.”

Ellie watched as his hands shifted back to their normal, human shape. They shrunk the slightest bit, as though that form had made them swell up a bit, and the claws receded until they were the normal, blunt and human shape and length. Then the blackness that coated his skin like ink pulled back and disappeared beneath the cuff of his shirt. All this happened in just about two seconds; if Ellie had blinked, she’d have missed it. It was also, like the rest of anything Chevias does, an eerily quiet process. Perhaps you would expect such a drastic change to be accompanied by the sound of clicking or crunching bones, or a sandpapery, slithering noise as the inky blackness crawled onto his skin, but it was completely silent. It was no wonder Ellie hadn’t noticed anything at first.

Chevias went through the hole into the dark office. Ellie waited until another crimson light flickered on, bathing the room in that eerie glow before following him, being careful not to scratch herself on the wood.

The office was sparse and messy; it looked like it had been ransacked. The desk had been overturned and flung across the room, the book shelves had been cleared of anything that was once on them, and a tall cabinet with four drawers had been yanked out and emptied. Despite the mess, there wasn’t a single scrap of paper strewn about.

“There’s nothing here.”

“They must’ve cleaned it out before leaving. Come on, see if you can find a metal plate. It’ll be long and rectangular, with some Witch-Speak on it.”

It didn’t take long to find. It had been stuffed behind one of the open drawers of the cabinet, obviously hidden.

Chevias picked it up, appeared to read the Witch-Speak for a moment, before turning to the back wall of the office. It was unadorned except for a slightly indented portion of the wall. Ellie would’ve missed it entirely, but Chevias seemed to have known it would be there.

He walked over and placed the panel into the indent. The Witch-Speak flashed, this time the same light green as Chevias’ grimoire. Then the wall behind it opened up and slid to the side.

It was high up, so Ellie had to stand on her toes to properly see what was inside. She was a little disappointed. The wall had opened up to reveal what looked like a safe. Ellie had been expecting a safe to contain jewels, or valuable information. The contents of this safe were mostly…junk. There were several items in it, most of them made out of what looked like copper, steel, and another bluish metal that Ellie didn’t recognize. They looked like tinker-toys, or pieces of a clock tower…Ellie wasn’t sure how to describe them.

Chevias ignored the large pieces of metal and pushed them out of the way until he found a box. The box was somewhat small and covered in very dusty velvet. He pulled it out and opened it.

The box contained a necklace. Now, a necklace was closer to what Ellie imagined belonged in a safe, but this necklace hardly looked valuable enough to stow away. It looked like a piece of junk that was laced onto a string. It was a flat, irregularly shaped piece of metal that was silvery-blue in color (at least Ellie supposed it was, as it was currently bathed in the red light). It had a strange pattern and was otherwise un-noteworthy.

“You came all the way down here for this? Who would want this?”

Chevias shrugged, “Who knows, I’m just an errand boy. Come on, let’s go.” He turned around and started heading for the door.

Ellie glanced back at the still open vault, “Aren’t you going to close it?”

“No point. Even if someone found this place, those things aren’t valuable anymore.” Naturally he didn’t explain why these items were useless, or what their original use was. He just exited through the hole and didn’t look back. Ellie scrambled after him.

Instead of heading back the way they came, Chevias lead her further into the bunker, finding that the floor began to slope up again and that the rooms on this side were a bit different from the ones on the other.

Several appeared to be armories filled with dusty, ancient looking weapons. None of them looked fancy or particularly valuable. Another room was a sprawling one filled with empty shelves. Ellie wasn’t sure if this had been a larder or a library, but she supposed that it didn’t make much sense for an army to carry a library around with them. They passed another particularly large room that looked like an infirmary with beds surrounded by tattered curtains, trays with abandoned medicine, and shelves of old bandages. Even in the crimson light Ellie could see that most of the beds were covered in bloodstains.

They passed several rooms that were identical to the ones above and several more that Ellie couldn’t fathom the purpose of, like rooms filled with large bird cages and rooms with nothing at all.

They walked and walked and walked for what seemed to Ellie like an eternity in this dreariness until the hall finally came to an end.

Instead of a ladder and a trapdoor, like the other end of the bunker, this end was a door. A big, heavy looking metal door. Chevias opened this one just like he did the trapdoor and it swung open at his command. Ellie looked through the door to see that it was surrounded by dead leaves and debris and that there was a steep and narrow set of stairs going up for awhile. At the top of the stairs, the first natural light she’d seen in hours spilled in from a hole just big enough for an adult to squeeze through.

Chevias climbed the stairs and, with his lithe form, slipped through the hole as easily as a rabbit. He turned around, “Come on, you’re almost there!”

Ellie clambered up after him and grabbed his hand through the hole. He pulled and picked her right up out of it. Ellie gratefully breathed in the fresh air as Chevias set her down. She was so thrilled to be at ground level again that she barely noticed the way the setting sun stung her eyes.

Chevias shaded his eyes and looked around, “Alright! Tyman should be about a half hour’s walk from here. We should be able to make it by nightfall.”

Ellie squinted and looked at her surroundings. The hole that lead to the hidden bunker was nestled between the roots of a large tree, hidden well from all but bunnies and squirrels. The tree wasn’t especially odd looking, except that it was surrounded by the same kind of stone markers that had surrounded the clearing last night. She supposed that anybody who didn’t know what they were would easily overlook these signs, and that one of them must point the way to Tyman.

“Come on Ellie, we wanna get there before it gets too dark!”

“Coming!”

Ellie glanced back at the hole, so dark and innocuous you’d never guess what was down there just by looking, before following Chevias as he stepped over one of the stone markers.

#mystery #adventure #fantasy #AWitch'sTail #tapas #tapastic #tapasbook

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