The next three days of travel seemed to blur by for Dren in a kind of fugue, one that saw them making good time north and east thanks largely to Andrei’s familiarity with the terrain, combined with a selection of experimental spells that Holly had been working on for the better part of five months. The spellcraft involved utilizing elements already present in nature and amplifying them in order to scout the territory they would be traversing, which allowed her to see, hear, and smell oncoming potential dangers from a distance of almost five or six miles.
Of course, not every such spell or skill is perfect, and the company did end up running into a couple of potentially harmful situations with rashum in the wilds. The first had been near sunset on the first day, when the horses drawing the wagon had gotten spooked badly enough by either a sound or a scent they’d picked up that they almost bolted clear of their traces. Fighting with the reins, Norto had managed to get the animals to draw off toward a small spring in the middle of a field of witchgrass, only to discover that it had been the spring that was the source of the trouble; a set of bizarre, rainbow-striped creatures, each as large as a hunting dog and looking like turtles with narrow, knife-like heads, came lurching up out of the water at the animals, jagged teeth snapping.
Andrei and Holly had put paid to them swiftly, Holly with a flurry of magical shards of ice, Andrei with a warhammer he’d decided to start carrying in place of his bastard sword. Norto and Dren had remained in the back of the wagon for the majority of the melee, and when it was over, they’d helped Andrei pry the hardened, multicolored shells off of the creatures’ backs. “Never know if something like these might fetch a price at an alchemist’s,” the freelancer had commented.
The second interruption brought on by rashum had been, by Dren’s estimation, almost completely unavoidable, regardless of any precautions the freelancer or mage may have taken. The creatures had come upon their camp in the pre-light hours of dawn, when they had gathered silently around the morning cookfire to prepare breakfast, noticed only as a furtive sense of movement along the perimeter of their camp, followed by Holly tensing as something snagged on the magical barrier she’d set up the night before.
The creatures were translucent, almost completely invisible to the naked eye. However, coming into contact with Holly’s barrier had covered the forms of three large, rangy beasts with a fine crimson dust, snarling as the creatures collectively realized they’d been spotted by their would-be prey. Dren let out a yelp and scurried on his hands and backside away from one of them, for up close, even though he could partly see through the beast, he could make out features that struck his mind into a realm of terror he knew only by means of instinct.
It had the hairy, muscular build of a great wolf, but the head of some kind of viper, and at its hindquarters, there wavered some kind of stinger-like tail, dripping wetly as its lower jaw unhinged, bringing its face at him. The young smithy could scarcely let out a noise as he flailed back away from the monster, but he finally did let one out when Andrei, putting himself bodily between Dren and the creature, planted his armored ass right in Dren’s face as he took a combat-ready stance.
The young smithy had nearly been concussed by the loose armor plates that hung down over Andrei’s backside from his cuirass.
Given the alternative of having his face eaten or a poisonous sting administered to one of his many soft and squishy bits, Dren counted himself fortunate by the time this debacle had concluded. Even Norto had managed to prove mildly helpful during this second encounter, hauling himself up onto one of the horses and leading it around the side of one of the beasts. The horse kicked out lethally with its hooves, staving in the rashum’s head efficiently.
When the pack of creatures was dead, Dren found himself staring at them, fascinated. In death, the chameleon-like effect of their soft, shimmery coats of fur completely vanished. Andrei came up beside him and shook his head, pushing down on the throat of the beast with his heel to ensure it was dead. “Phase beasts,” the minotaur proclaimed.
“Are they common in this region,” Dren asked, crouching down for a better look at the corpse.
“Not usually, though this is an average-sized pack,” said the freelancer. “I don’t know a whole lot about them, though, just that they’re hard to spot, dark or light out.” Holly came toward them with a grin, hands ducking into her pouches and coming up with an empty glass flask and a penknife.
“I have a colleague who was obsessed with these creatures for a brief while,” said the Cuyotai mage, kneeling down next to the head of the beast. Her snout fur curled a little in proximity to the rashum, and Dren could see her nostrils flaring and contracting rapidly, her heightened, canine sense of scent clearing detecting something that neither he nor Andrei could pick up on. “She told me that if you can recover some of the fluid from a phase beast’s tear duct, boil it with a mixture of tinlar root and sage, it creates a veritable panacea for most kinds of toxins in the wilds.”
As she ever so slowly brought the tip of the penknife down toward the slitted eye of the phase beast, Andrei inquired, “Couldn’t you just scoop out the whole eyeball?” Dren couldn’t say if it had been the absurdity or abruptness with which he’d asked the question; he could only say for certain that once the words hung in the air, Holly’s hand twitched, the tip of the blade flickered forward, and a thin line of some viscous, pearlescent juice squirted straight out of the beast’s eye and onto the grass beside the minotaur’s foot.
Still staring down into the ruin of the creature’s eyesocket, she simply said, “No, you can’t.” She wiped the penknife off in the grass and moved stiffly, grumbling under her breath, toward one of the other fallen creatures for another attempt without distractions. Andrei cleared his throat, rubbing at the back of his head awkwardly.
“Maybe I’ll just,” he began.
“Yeahhh, probably a good idea,” Dren finished for him quietly, moving himself back toward the firepit of their campsite.
Beyond these incidents (the second of which yielded three separate vials of the phase beast tears for Holly), their travel had been swift and peaceful. As they approached sunset of the third day, Dren called over to Andrei, who was at that time riding his mount flanking the wagon on the left, “Should we start looking for a spot to camp?”
“No need,” the freelancer replied, pointing slightly northwest of their path at the moment. “We can make it back to the nearby trade road in about half an hour, then just make north for the village of Morin about an hour after that. I figure we can take a full stretch while we’re there, do a little resupply tomorrow and eat like civilized people for a change, you know? Sleep on beds and whatnot.”
Dren let out a pleased sigh and nodded to this idea. It had been a long time since he had traveled any farther outside of Desanadron than Vershak, the farming community half a day’s ride south of the metro. Though it was little more than an inch-thick sack of cotton stuffing stretched out over springs and a frame, he missed his own bed and sleeping with a solid roof over his head.
“You’ve been to this village before,” Holly called over, leaning forward to speak past Dren to the minotaur.
“A few times, yes,” Andrei replied.
“And were you sober the last time,” she followed with an impish grin. She looked quickly back into the wagon over her shoulder, squinted, and continued. “Because it seems to me you’re pretty much out of road ale.” Andrei glowered at the back of the covered wagon, mentally cursing Norto out for carving through his supply of booze.
“There’s not a lot of places I’ve been where I wasn’t either stone sober or wet as a stream bed in high storm season,” the freelancer eventually remarked. “But I’ve also been at this work for a long time. A lot of places, they tend to start blurring together after a while.” This much, at least, was accurate. Morin had been one of the handful of places where Andrei recalled passing through on numerous occasions, but nothing in his immediately accessible memory struck a chord with him. It was just one of those little mudsplat villages that relied on surrounding agriculture to remain vital and livable.
As a territory, Morin fell just outside of the Desanadronian City-State lines, politically. The nearest major city or region that could lay any kind of claim to it would be the Freehold State of Bios, though Andrei had never taken it upon himself to stay abreast of the political situation in the Freeholds beyond any overt hostilities between one major city and another. He had no idea if Morin was a protectorate, or its own sovereign village this year.
It was a protectorate the last time I rolled through, he thought to himself as they angled north, toward the trade road. But that was about two years ago, he mentally added, slowing his mount a little and signaling for Dren to pull back on the reins of the wagon’s horses. They all drew level to a halt fifteen or so yards later, and the minotaur drew out his farviewer from the sheath he kept it in just forward of his saddlehorn.
He peered ahead as far as he could, making fine adjustments on the device’s lens end until the image before him sharpened. Andrei’s lips peeled back as he sucked in air sharply through his teeth. “What’s the matter,” Dren asked, keeping his voice pitched low.
“Provost guards on the trade road,” Andrei said, counting the armored figures milling about on the trade road ahead, perhaps a mile-and-a-half off. From this distance he could only make out the general build of them and the metallic glint of their armor; whoever they were, they were kitted out for heavy combat. “Could be a problem. They’re heavies, from first glance.” Andrei pulled the farviewer from his eye and collapsed it, turning his head to look to Dren and Holly. “Suggestions?”
Dren immediately deferred, without a word, to the Cuyotai mage, who was squinting in the direction of the possible guardsmen. “How far away are they,” she asked.
“About a mile-and-a-half.” Holly clambered into the back of the wagon then, eliciting an unintelligible noise of concern or irritation from Norto that Andrei couldn’t quite make out entirely, reappearing a minute later with a thick, red-covered book of some sort in hand. She settled down on the bench seat and flipped through several pages, intently scanning their contents until she finally used one clawed finger to carefully, slowly scroll along a page.
“I’ve got an idea here,” she said, looking to the freelancer. “But given your dislike of magic, you might not fully trust it.”
“I’m listening,” Andrei replied cautiously.
**
“Someone headed our way, boss,” said one of the humans in the group, pointing a gauntleted finger down the trade road. Arick pulled up his binoculars from his hip, spotting the covered wagon about three-quarters of a mile away. A tall, pale white flag stood flapping in the evening breeze from the bench seat, bearing the blue semi-circle crest of the Order of Oun, the paramilitary religious organization that had spread to all corners of the realms. The wagon driver, a burly and broad-chested minotaur, wore the pearl-white plate armor of a knight or paladin of the Order, and as the wagon shifted position along the road slightly, Arick could just make out the sigil embroidered on the wagon’s cover; a pair of snakes twined around a needle.
The lizardman pulled his binoculars down from his eyes and motioned for his men to keep their weapons sheathed. “It’s a medical supply transport, Order of Oun,” he said with a sigh to his people. “We don’t want any trouble from those people. Stand down and try to keep out of the guy’s way.” It had been weeks since his band had come across any good marks, and his own boss, the gang’s leader, had demanded that all messenger birds seen taking to the skies from anywhere in the village be shot down on sight. Nobody could send for help, which kept them secure, but it also meant nobody was coming with possible loot. If the gang didn’t make some more profit soon, they’d have to haul stakes and move on to one of the other small towns in the Freeholds.
As the wagon drew nearer, Arick gave a small hand motion to one of his smarter operatives, an illeck woman by the name of Jader. The white-haired woman, walking awkwardly in the bulky armor they’d ‘requisitioned’ from the village’s constabulary, a force of only five middle-aged jafts with little combat experience, came over to him with her head hung slightly down.
“This do-gooder gets closer, I want you to feel him out for magic,” Arick half-whispered to the dark elf, who nodded without a word. “If we’re lucky, we can send word to one of our people in the village to take a look-see in the wagon if this holy roller stays at the inn tonight.”
“It’s not like he’ll have much choice,” Jader pointed out. “Sun’s almost down, next village is at least two hours away. Order guy like this, he’s got to know there’s rendermen in the region, and if he’s on his own, he’s not going to want to risk being caught out there at night with them.”
“Fair,” said Acker, now angling himself toward the road as he stepped backwards to clear himself completely out of the wagon’s path. The lizardman could feel Jader conjuring her mana, and the illeck’s fingers shimmered out from the links in her gauntlets as she used her subtle magics to consider the wagon as it passed. The minotaur paladin driving his team of three horses didn’t so much as turn his head to consider the sentries posted along the trade road on either side, slipping without a word past them on his way toward the village proper, a quarter of a mile beyond the provosts. “Well? What’s your reading, Jader,” the lizardman tough asked softly, watching the back of the wagon recede toward the village. When he slid his eyes to look directly at the illeck woman, her complexion had gone from its typical ashy, off-gray to a paler hue, her eyes wide with either greed or awe.
“My read is that that wasn’t any kind of paladin,” Jader remarked, eyes slowly narrowing, arms folding over her chest so she could cock one slender hand up to pull on her angular chin. “And whatever he’s carrying, there’s an awful lot of magic in his wagon.” She slanted her eyes toward him and said, “I think we should send a runner for Hector.”
Acker tried not to show his distaste for the idea, but he felt the familiar pull of his facial scales as he grimaced ever-so-slightly at the mention of Hector. Hector was the boss’s ace in the hole, the one truly unstoppable member of the gang. ‘Member’ might be pushing it, Acker thought. He pinched the ridge of his face just above his slitted nostrils, letting out a low sigh.
“Do it,” he said. Jader nodded and made her way over to one of the other men, who then swiftly dashed after the wagon, fading from physical view after only a few paces. Acker wondered if the minotaur might finally prove capable of handling Hector. The men and women of the Order of Oun were no lightweights, to be sure, but just because they could hold their own against most folks didn’t mean that they could go toe-to-toe with something like Hector.
“I suppose we’ll find out,” the lizardman muttered to himself.
**
Holly smirked as she peeked through the flap at the back of the wagon. “Amateur hour,” she said quietly. “This guy’s not even a real mage, he’s just using enchanted equipment.”
“How can you tell,” asked Norto, pressing his face against the side of her snout to try and spot what she was looking at. “I can’t even see anything out there.”
“I’ve been trained to see stuff like this,” Holly said, leaning back to let the flap close. “Enchanted boots to give him speed, and a chameleon cloak to mask his visible presence. Does nothing for his scent or the noise he makes, and doesn’t cover tracks he leaves. He’s been following us since we passed the guards.”
“Who weren’t guards at all,” Dren pointed out, huddled up right behind her. Holly’s left hand continued to rotate, fingers half-curled, maintaining the illusion she had cast over the wagon, the horses and Andrei prior to making their approach to the faux guardsmen. “They weren’t wearing that armor at all naturally, it was too big for them.”
“How long are you going to be able to keep this up,” Andrei called back into the wagon over his shoulder, trying to keep his voice pitched low-ish.
“Maybe another ten minutes or so,” Holly replied. She watched as the transluscent form that had been following them suddenly dashed around the flank of the wagon then, disappearing from her sight once they started passing outlying residences of the village. “No more need, now.” She relaxed her hand, and with an audible rush of air, the illusion fell away, leaving Andrei looking like his normal self, driving the three-horse team from the bench up front.
It took only a few minutes before he rangled the wagon around the side of the village’s lone two-story inn, a long brick structure that appeared to have been renovated not too long before. The stablehand who met the minotaur as he halted before the huge, sliding barn door was an elven youth, his hair light brown to match the fading bruising around his left eye, the tip of his pointed nose slightly bent as if it too had been damaged recently.
Andrei’s nose was nowhere near as sensitive as the cuyotai mage woman’s, but he could smell the sickly-sweet stain of sweat and grime on the stablehand. The young elven man’s hair was greasy and unkempt, and if he didn’t miss his guess, the fellow had likely been wearing the same clothes for several days now. Something about this overall presentation, added in with the guards who were not guards, left him feeling even more apprehensive about staying in the village than he had been before. If the highwaymen had just been a bunch of goons hanging out on the outskirts of town, waiting for easy marks, no problem.
They’ve got a foothold in the village, he thought as he lowered himself from the bench of the wagon and handed the horses’ reins to the stablehand as though nothing were amiss. “My companions and I are going to get some rooms inside,” he said evenly to the elf, plucking out a single silver coin from one of his waist pouches. “This is for you, take them in once we have our necessaries out of the wagon.” He pulled out three more silver coins and waggled them in his palm for a moment, noting no sign of greed in the elf’s eyes, but a shiftiness, darting back and forth as if expecting someone to leap from the shadows and snatch the money away before it could be his. “And these will be yours in the morning, if I find our mounts properly brushed and groomed as well as fed when we awaken,” he added, pocketing the extra coins once more.
The stablehand was nodding as Holly, Dren and Norto came around from the back of the wagon, the majority of their gear strapped to their backs or carried by sturdy strap handles. As Holly reached Andrei, she set one bag down, rooting around in another for a small pad of yellow legal paper and a pen, handing them to Andrei. “You may want to write him out any special instructions for that huge horse of yours,” she said with a wink. Andrei just raised an eyebrow at her, but a moment later, he put pen to paper and ripped off his note, passing it to the elven stablehand.
‘Do they control the whole village’, he’d written. The stablehand considered the note for a moment, as if reading over a list, and then lifted his head, jaw set firmly, and nodded.
“It’s just a bloody big horse,” Norto grumbled, flapping his hands at them and turning away. “I’m going in now to get a room to myself, bugger you lot.” Dren started to turn about, but for Holly putting a gentle hand on his elbow to stay him. Dren saw that the elf was swiftly jotting something on the paper, then holding it up to Andrei and pointing at it. Dren stood on tip-toe, catching sight of what Andrei had written, and now, the stablehand’s response-
‘They’re likely preparing to attack you tonight’.
**
“This just feels wrong,” Dren said, his stomach complaining at him as he sat on the edge of the rented bed, arms crossed over his abdomen, nerves jangling. A cold sweat had begun to break out on his forehead, and despite his hard-earned dislike of Norto, he despised using the older smithy as bait this way. When the stablehand had led the horses and wagon away, Andrei, Holly and Dren had held a brief huddle before heading into the inn, led almost single-handedly by the veteran freelancer.
Andrei’s plan was simple; they would stash all of their valuable gear in Norto’s room, claiming, if the miserable old sot complained, that his reputation would protect him from would-be catburglars. Once that was squared away, they would each unlock two other rooms, rented under Andrei and Holly’s names, then all take refuge in the room next to Norto’s, which they would rent in just Dren’s name.
“Stow how it feels for now, kid,” Andrei rumbled, leaning on his warhammer, its massive steel head resting on the floor in front of the room’s lone door. “Holly, any movement outside?” The cuyotai mage was crouched by the window, eyes half-lidded as she trained a minor vision spell on the exterior of the inn.
“There’s something coming toward us,” she said, cocking her head to one side. “Three humes, and something else, something magical in nature. I can’t quite make out what it is,” she said, fascinated by the queer yellowish pulsing coming from the tiny orb that seemed, in her magical vision’s field of view, to be hovering along behind the only three people out on the village’s streets at this late hour of the night.
“Regardless, I can guarantee it’s for us,” Andrei said. “Whoever these cretins are, they’re making their move.” The freelancer hefted his warhammer up into a ready stance, signaling with his head for Holly to move from the window to the door as he slid back out of her way. “Dren, get back there, into the corner.” The small smithy nodded and tucked himself into the corner of the room farthest from the door leading out into the hallway, armed only with one of his roughwork hammers in the unlikely event someone saw him as a threat.
When the thugs entered the inn, Andrei pegged them right away for rank amateurs; they made enough noise just on their way up the stairs to the second floor to have woken anyone else in the building, if there had been any other guests within. They had paused down on the first floor for only half a minute, likely checking the register after telling the check-in clerk, a human who had looked almost as terrified of Andrei and company when they checked in as the stablehand had, to keep his trap shut so he’d stay living.
Andrei had written himself in on the register book as bunking with Norto, using a bit of misdirection to aid in setting the trap; ‘The Honourable Sir Jaghorn, of the Order of Oun, Escorting Norto, Reknowned Blacksmith for Order Business’. It played twofold, he had explained to Holly and Dren, feeding into the illusion work that Holly had laid out on their way into town, and trading on Norto’s notoriety.
The footfalls of three people out in the hallway were accompanied by a fourth set, but slower, far heavier, and still clomping their way up the stairwell. Andrei raised one eyebrow at Holly, who silently shrugged her shoulders at him, drawing her mana about herself. As the clomping steps drew to the top of the steps, Andrei could feel their owner’s weight vibrating through the very floorboards.
A moment later, faintly, he heard one of the humes in the hall say, “What is it, Hector?”
“There is mana being drawn up in that room,” replied the cold, lifeless voice of some kind of machine mimicking mortal speech. Andrei felt a cannonball drop into the pit of his stomach as the thumping began moving toward their would-be ambush post, recognizing what had spoken.
“They have a fucking golem,” he snarled.