The cart shuddered momentarily as its wheel hit a particularly large rock, making Rita’s head smack painfully into her own abdomen.
Ow. She was sleeping, why was someone carrying her bed around? Wait, that was wrong. She wasn’t in her bed. She was on a wagon, finally on her way to Grailmane!
Rita rubbed her face and levered her torso upright, wrapping her thick blanket around her shoulders. All of them in the back of the wagon had blankets for the trip.
She could feel the ‘joint’ where torso attached to her thorax ache in complaint at the position she had slept in. It wasn’t even really a joint, it was more like particularly flexible part of her spine, positioned right at the top where her hips would normally have started, if she had any. Which she didn’t.
She’d explored it with her hands a bit, tracing along the faint ridges of her spine, and had found a number of thick muscles that had no analogue in a human body, holding it steady, like powerful back muscles. Those were the ones that didn’t like being folded double for extended periods of time. Such as when sleeping, for example.
Rita tried to massage a bit of life back into the stiff, creaking ‘hinge muscles’ as she’d taken to calling them. She was surprisingly flexible and could bend double with her back touching her thorax and her head resting on her own abdomen, but the position didn’t feel natural. It made her back muscles cramp. Whoever - or whatever - had designed her body had done a shitty job of it.
No, that wasn’t fair. Rita had only had biology up to high school level, but even with that limited knowledge she could tell that it was an incredible accomplishment. Her spider half shouldn’t even have been able to function! It was too big! Plus spider biology worked completely differently to that of humans, and yet the Tree, because she assumed it was the Tree that had done it, had managed to seamlessly merge human and spider anatomy in a way that both felt natural and hadn’t left her with any crippling health issues. Yet.
That didn’t mean the resultant form necessarily made sense however. Why the awkward hinge in between human and spider? Why not just keep her humanoid? Why give her extendable teeth?
Oh shoot, that reminded her. She’d forgotten to do her exercises before she’d fallen asleep. She’d dutifully done them every day before bed while she’d been at Triskellion, but the steady sway of the wagon as it rumbled down the simple dirt road connecting the Outpost to Grailmane had made her nod off without intending to.
The wagon they were traveling in was nothing fancy, just a simple wooden construction designed for hauling goods. It consisted of a simple, large wooden cargo bed with a seat for the driver at the front, all on four large, wooden wheels.
Lashed to the front were a pair of large, shaggy, broad creatures that were apparently horses, though no breed that Rita had ever seen before. Their bodies with thick and chunky with legs that looked like tree trunks. If they really were horses, they had a bit of elephant in their geneology.
They plodded along quietly, barely moving faster than a slow walk through the same rocky landscape that had surrounded Triskellion. They slowly made their way along the simple dirt trail winding through the rolling foothills of the mountain looming above them with no sign of tiring.
The land wasn’t completely desolate, however. Scraggly-looking grass sprouted from what soil there was available, and a few hardened shrubs eked out a living between the rocks.
All told, after days of scuttling around in the barren depths of the Nightmare it all looked surprisingly green.
She shivered and wrapped her blanket a little tighter around her shoulders. How long had she been asleep? It had to have been several hours. A cool breeze was blowing and far above, the sky was filled with dark grey clouds where there had been nothing but fluffy whiteness when they’d set off from Triskellion.
It had gotten colder, but hopefully it didn’t start to rain. They had a waterproof canvas cover in the wagon, lying next to her spear, that they could put up, but it was designed to keep goods dry, not people. The heavy thing would be resting on their heads the entire journey.
Looking around the wagon, she realized that she hadn’t been the only one to nod off. Ava lay at the far end of the wagon from Rita, right behind the driver, curled up in a thick, wooly blanket with her back to the rest of the group. She appeared to be fast asleep, finally resting from her ordeal.
Behind her, Bob sat, looking decidedly uncomfortable as Zaxier lay curled up and nestled deeply in his blanket covered lap. Upon seeing Rita wake up, he perked up immediately. “Miss Rita! Can I ask a favour?” he whispered.
Rita yawned and stretched. “Sure, Bob, what can I do for you?” she replied softly, so as not to wake the sleepers.
“I need to go pee so bad, but Mister Zee is napping on my lap. Can you hold him for me while I go?” he begged. “Miss Ava is asleep and Miss Gora doesn’t like cats.”
“I don’t mind cats in principle,” Gora said in a low rumble from where she was sitting against the side of the cart, blanket draped across her legs. “I just mind them on me. Seriously, you should just throw him off.”
“I can’t do that! Mister Zee gets grouchy when his naps are interrupted!” Bob whispered back, dismayed that someone would even think of interrupting his master’s naptime.
Rita stifled a chuckle. It was weird to think of the tightly curled ball of fluff in Bob’s arms as the master, especially when he had his paws so adorably curled over his nose.
Secretly, Rita had wanted to cuddle the kitty ever since she’d first seen him back in that apartment inside the Nightmare. She’d just never had the courage to ask him if she could. What if it was offensive that she wanted to treat him like a pet? But if Bob was going to hand him to her, well, that was different, now wasn’t it?
“Of course, Bob. Can you just give me a few moments? There’s just something I need to do quickly, first,” she whispered back.
When he nodded, she stretched open her jaw and unfolded her two teeth, stretching them out to their limit. They were already less stiff than they had been at the doctor’s office. Hopefully, she could soon go back to completely forgetting they even existed.
As she gently gripped them between thumb and forefinger and began moving them through their range of motion, she glanced over to Bob to find him staring at her in wide-eyed horror. Oh, right. He hadn’t seen her face-tentacle-things yet.
“Miss Rita?” he said, voice quivering softly. “You have something on your face…”
Rita sucked her teeth back into her mouth and laughed awkwardly. “It’s okay, Bob, it’s just my teeth. They can… umm… extend. I hurt them before I met you and the doctor said I have to keep moving them around a bit so that they heal properly.”
She looked over to where Samual was sitting next to her, still in his casual clothes. He was upright and too tense to be sleeping, but his eyes were closed and he did not react in the slightest. He was either meditating or just ignoring everyone.
“You never did mention how you hurt them in the first place,” Gora said softly.
Rita looked embarrassed. “I freaked out when I first discovered I had them and… erm… I tried to yank them out. At the time, I thought they were brain worms burrowing into my face.”
As Rita busied herself with her exercises again, blushing bright red, Gora burst out in full belly laughter. It made the driver - an ex-delver named Josoph who did the run regularly - glance over his shoulder and do a double-take. Even Samual opened one eye, looked over at Rita to see what the noise was about and froze.
Sighing, Rita pulled her teeth back in. “Guys, could you stop staring? I’m self-conscious enough about my body as it is.”
Samual shrugged and closed his eyes again, while the old delver firmly turned his eyes back to the road, muttering about ‘crazy wierdos’.
“I think your body looks very nice, Miss Rita. It looks a bit like a spider,” Bob mumbled awkwardly.
“Thank you, Bob, I am aware that it does,” Rita said softly, smiling gently at the innocence of his statement. “But it’s very kind of you to say. I appreciate the compliment.”
Rita finally managed to finish stretching out her face-limbs without interruptions, turning her head away from the rest of the group. She had the rear of the wagon to herself. Her body, which she’d turned sideways to be as compact as possible, took up just about the entire width of the wagon.
“Okay,” she whispered once she’d finished, holding out her arms towards Bob. “Give that adorable little sleeping ball of fluff to me.”
Bob carefully climbed to his feet without jostling his master too much and gently handed him off to Rita. Zaxier lazily opened one eye during the process, gazing balefully up at Rita for a few moments. As soon as he was settled in, however, he wiggled himself into a more comfortable position against her body as Bob hopped over the side and ran for a nearby shrub.
“Mmm, Rita, you are much softer and warmer than the boy,” he purred sleepily before dozing off again.
Rita looked down at Zaxier curled up tightly against her breasts, purring deeply.
Strange. Somehow it felt less innocent when they could talk.
They travelled in relative silence for hours, watching the landscape roll by as they slowly plodded along. They followed the steadily climbing trail as it dipped and twisted, leading around steep cliffs and past large boulders. The rocky ground under them grew steadily darker and the greenery ever sparser as they journeyed ever higher.
To their left, the peaks of the Grailspine Mountains loomed overhead. A massive range of dark rock stretching high into the sky and far off into the distance, both in front and behind them. Despite having no sign of snow on their tops, Rita suspected they would easily give something like the Alps back home a run for their money.
Rita wasn’t sure how high the peaks were, but they were pretty damned high. It was quite possible that in this odd world, things didn’t get colder the higher you went.
As they’d come ever closer to their destination, Rita had grown more and more nervous. There was just so much that was a complete unknown to her. What was the city like? What were the people like? Would she like it there? Where was she going to sleep? Would she be arrested on sight? Treated like a monster?
“Gora, tell me about Grailmane,” Rita finally asked when her own nervous fidgeting started to threaten to drive her insane.
“What’s there to say?” Gora shrugged. “It’s a big city. Crowded. Noisy. Dirty. The usual, I suppose.”
Rita frowned. That didn’t tell her anything. “Justine said it’s known as the ‘City of Demons’? What does that mean?” she asked.
“It’s the only place in Aer where it’s legal to summon demons,” Gora scowled. “Or where they aren’t killed on sight, for that matter.”
“You don’t seem to happy about that…” Rita asked carefully.
“Guess I can’t complain too much. Its also one of the few places where cambions are allowed, and the only one where they’re treated like people, or so I’ve heard,” Gora explained. “I just don’t like demons.”
“You don’t like demons?” Rita laughed, looking up at the long, backward curving horns on her head.
“Hey, the feeling’s mutual, believe me,” Gora growled. “They don’t like us much either.”
“Us? You mean cambions?”
Gora nodded.
The cart’s wheel went over a rock, jolting everyone inside. Rita reached back and quickly grabbed Zaxier as she felt him starting to slide off her thorax.
She’d let him sleep in her arms until he’d started massaging her chest with his paws in his sleep, at which point she’d decided enough was enough. Unlike Bob, she had had no problem interrupting his nap if he was being a pain, so she’d put him down and gave him a pat on his rear.
The cat had blinked in confusion a few times at suddenly finding himself standing on the swaying wooden cart, before wordlessly walking around and hopping onto the back of Rita’s thorax. There, he’d curled himself up and had been sleeping quite comfortably since. She hadn’t had the heart to wake him up twice.
“How big is the city?” Rita asked.
“Why don’t you look for yourself?” Gora replied, nodding towards the road ahead of them.
They had slowly been approaching the top of the latest hill that they’d been climbing, but there had been several such hills before. Each provided little more than a view of the next.
“This is the last hill? Grailmane is on the other side?” Rita asked. She hadn’t realized they were that close, though they had been traveling for a fair while already. Three mealtimes worth, plus a reasonably long nap. So likely about a day? If it was, the horses had kept going all ‘night’, which was pretty damn impressive.
“Not exactly, but almost. It’s the first one where you can see the city from.”
Rita could barely sit still as the wagon crawled slowly crested the hill. Then the ground seemed to sink away as the road slowly change from uphill, to level, then to downhill.
Far ahead of them, half hidden by the next hill in their path, stretched a city that seemed as much grown into the rock of the mountain as built upon it. Dozens of tall, stone spires reached skywards, while masses of dark gray buildings clumped around their bases, nearly blended into the dark stone of the mountain.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
The place seemed dark and foreboding, and not just because of how most of the buildings appeared to have been built out of the same darker stone and rock as the surrounding mountainside. There was just something about the atmosphere around the city.
Then Rita noticed a tiny carriage rolling over the hilltop in front of them. She blinked as her perspective adjusted to the new scale, considering the city was still probably as far again on the other side of that hill…
Holy crap, those spires were massive! And the city… the city had to be absolutely humongous! It sprawled across the side of the mountain, swallowing smaller hills and bumps and flowing between the larger ones.
“It’s so big…” Rita whispered, eyes wide as she stared. “How many people live in Grailmane?”
“Beats me,” Gora replied casually. “A lot.”
“There’s never been a successful census done in Grailmane,” Samual spoke up. “But estimates put it at between a quarter and half a million.”
Rita’s eyes widened. That was not as many as some of the big cities back on Earth, but it was still a lot. A hell of a lot, especially for somewhere this desolate and with a level of technology that did not appear to have figured out flushing toilets yet, if Triskellion had been any indication.
“Whose estimates?” Gora asked, quizzically.
Samual just shrugged in reply, clearly having no intention of answering.
“How is that possible?” Rita asked. “I mean, how do you even feed that many people? This place is basically just rock!”
“At the foot of the mountains, over that way,” Samual answered, pointing towards the lowlands far below them, “lies an extremely fertile strip of land before you hit true Holy Mitlan territory. The farmers there are technically loosely affiliated with the Mitlans, but they export most of their what they grow to Grailmane. Less taxes that way.”
So they had Mitlan farmers feeding Grailmane? Awkward…
“The rest is imported either through Silkhaven via ships” he added, pointing ahead to where Rita could see a vast ocean shimmering in the far distance thanks to the curvature of Aer, “or simply by direct teleportation.”
Rita’s head snapped around. “Teleportation? You have teleportation magic? Then why are we riding this thing?” She slapped her hands on the sides of the cart.
“Because teleporting stuff is expensive,” Gora rumbled. “Way more than this lot can afford. Teleporting people even more so. Apparently it’s harder or something.”
“Yes. It is,” Ava muttered from the front of the cart. She was awake now, but was still wrapped up in her blanket. “It requires a much higher precision. If a couple of kernels of grain don’t make it through the teleport in one piece, nobody even notices. If a couple of pieces of you don’t make it through the teleport in one piece, well… let’s just say you won’t be laying any complaints.”
As they passed over the crest of the hill, the wagon turned to follow a switchback route down the slope and descending into the valley before the next hill ahead. The city of Grailmane slowly began sliding out of sight.
“Nobody uses teleportation for grain, Ava,” Samual said.
“The Academy does,” Ava replied. “The good stuff. From New Azalon. They use it to bake the fluffiest bread rolls.”
Rita smiled. It was good to hear Ava participating in the conversation again. She’d bounced back pretty well from the haggard, traumatized mess huddling in her blankets on top of her bed. She was still a little distant, and she was still huddling in her blanket, but she was talking at least.
It seemed like she’d decided to pretend the last part of their conversation had simply never happened. Rita was fine with that.
“Such an indulgent waste,” Samual mumbled.
“Hey! Just try them once and you’ll change your mind!” Ava protested.
“Okay, okay, I’m sure the fluffy bread is lovely,” Rita laughed. “But what about the average Joe on the street? Do all of their stuff come in by wagon?”
That seemed like an awful lot of food that had to be transported every day. Earth cities managed it, but they had trucks, trains and refrigeration units. These people still shipped by wagons drawn by horses. Freakishly buff horses, admittedly, but still. If Grailmane was as nestled in the mountains as it had appeared, there was no way they could ship enough food in every day to feed a quarter of a million people.
“Yeah, they use these,” Gora replied, picking up one of the empty canvas bags scattered around the rear of the cart and tossing it to Rita.
It looked like a simple grain bag, about the size of a brown paper bag back on Earth. There were faint silvery lines stitched into the fabric in a pattern Rita couldn’t recognize, but otherwise it looked like the kind of thing you’d buy your potatoes in at a farmer’s market.
“It’s a bag,” Rita stated flatly, holding it up.
“Try sticking your hand inside,” Gora suggested.
Shrugging, Rita stuck her hand inside, all the way to the bottom of the bag… and couldn’t find it.
“What…?” she mumbled as she stuck her arm in even deeper, all the way up to the shoulder, before she finally felt the seam at the bottom of the bag. Rita looked down at the sight of her entire arm disappearing into a bag only as deep as her forearm. “What’s going on here?”
“Small scale spatial manipulation,” Ava supplied. “It’s not that impressive. That one only looks like a double.”
“This is incredible!” Rita laughed, waving her hand around inside and feeling it pass right through where her brain was telling her the wagon was.”
“Don’t leave your arm in there too long,” Gora suggested. “That stuff’s not healthy for you.”
Rita immediately yanked her arm out, feeling a faint tingling sensation in her fingers as she did so. Ava rolled her eyes at her.
“It’s fine, you’ll have to keep your arm in there for at least another few minutes before you’ll start suffering any ill effects,” Ava scoffed.
“Ill effects?” Rita asked warily, flexing her fingers. Thoughts of magically induced cancer were traipsing through her mind.
“It’s the time differential,” Ava explained. “Space is doubled inside and weight is halved, so time passes half as fast. Normally, a pretty useful effect as it keeps food fresher for longer, but having time pass slower for you arm than the rest of your body is not very healthy in the long term,” she lectured. “Your natural magic resistance resists the effect at first, which is why it feels normal if you stick your arm inside. But if you keep it in there, your resistance will slowly start getting worn down and your arm’s subjective time will start to fluctuate dangerously.”
Rita carefully dropped the suddenly much more dangerous seeming bag in the middle of the wagon with two fingers.
“Our packs are the same,” Gora said, patting her bulging backpack lying next to her. “Except they’re quads, not doubles. Four times larger on the inside than the outside.”
Rita’s eyes bulged. “That’s how you fit so much stuff in there!” she exclaimed, pointing her finger accusingly. “You’re literally carrying around magic bags!”
“Of course. How else would we be able to carry food and stuff for two weeks in one backpack?” Gora grinned. “They belong to the Guild, though. We need to hand them back in Grailmane.”
“Farmers carry around magic bags?” Rita asked, eyes still wide with amazement. Just how common was magic in this world. “I thought you said magic items were rare and expensive!”
“I said magic weapons were rare. Like Duncan’s bow,” Gora corrected her. “Magic itself is pretty common.”
“Besides, they’re just doubles,” Ava scoffed. “They aren’t that expensive. Not if you consider you can reuse them. Most people carry around at least a doubled purse.”
“Most people with money, you mean,” Gora replied.
“Most people who matter, yes,” Ava agreed, smirking. “Anyway, they get exponentially more expensive the higher the compression rate. It’s way harder and more expensive to make a bag that can hold ten times its size than it is to make five bags that can each hold double. Literally any idiot with a degree in magic can slap together one of those. They’re used pretty much everywhere people want to transport things.”
“I’ve heard the dwarves don’t,” Samual challenged her. “That they don’t trust our magic.”
“I’ve heard dwarves eat their young, doesn’t mean its true,” Ava retaliated.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if both of those were true,” Gora chuckled. “Dwarves are weird. Plus they use the low ways to transport, so that’s probably another way food gets into Grailmane. Underground.”
“Dwarves?” Rita asked. “There are dwarves here? Why haven’t I seen any?”
Rita had seen a couple of odd, clearly fantasy races, like a feathery humanoid with big eyes that Justine had called an ‘Awlin’ and a group of short, hunched creatures with long, spindly limbs that had wiggled their long, ratlike noses at her whenever she had passed nearby. But none of the other delvers had looked even remotely like the dwarves as they were portrayed in popular movies.
“You have them on your world as well? Figures,” Gora replied. “They’re everywhere, and nobody really knows where they come from.”
“No, we actually don’t have dwarves back on Earth. I mean, we sort of do, but it’s just a human with a medical condition that makes them really short,” Rita explained. “But we have them in movies and stories and stuff! Short and stout, right?”
“Yep, that’s them. They keep to their own. Same as the Nodol, really. Rarely join the delvers, but they occasionally send a group of their own through into the Nightmare. No guide or anything. Real strange. Usually make it back without issue, too. There weren’t any at Triskellion this time.”
“And what’s a ‘Nodol’?” Rita asked, picking up on another weird name she hadn’t heard before.
“Pasta people!” Bob exclaimed with a broad smile on his face, making Gora laugh.
“Shut up, moron,” Ava interjected. “They’re sapient fungi that look like they’re made out of dried pasta. We have a number of them at the Academy. They’re pretty good with magic.”
“So, pasta people,” Samual affirmed, nodding, ignoring the glare Ava gave him and Gora’s silent chuckles.
At this point, the only part of the city still visible were the stone spires protruding resolutely from behind the next hill. Rita stared as they slowly sunk away, out of sight, wondering idly what they were for.
“Rita, what races are there in your world?” Ava asked suddenly, before Rita could formulate the question.
“Races? Oh, just humans,” Rita replied.
“What? Seriously?”
“Yeah, seriously. I mean, we have animals and such, obviously, but the only sapient race on Earth is humans.”
Gora laughed. “Lucky you. Guess that’s one way to get rid of all the damn racism and bigotry and bullshit that we deal with over here.”
“Erm, no, actually, people are still pretty racist and bigoted back home,” Rita said.
“What? But… they’re all humans,” Ava said, frowning in confusion.
Rita shrugged. “I know. Don’t ask me why, I don’t understand it either.”
“So people just hate… themselves?” Gora tried.
Rita nodded thoughtfully. “Guilt’s a thing, I suppose. But no, they hate people for… like, you guys don’t like the Mitlans much, right?”
“That’s different,” Gora said. “I mean, you met the Mitlan Inquisitors, right?”
“Okay, sure, but not everyone are like those inquisitors, are they?”
“They aren’t too far off,” Samual said. “But yes, I suppose some of them are different.”
“Well, disliking someone just because they’re a Mitlan, that’s the sort of stuff we have back home,” Rita explained. “Or skin colour, or where they were born, or what language they speak…”
“That’s so stupid,” Gora said. “Most of the people in Grailmane can trace their roots back to some family that used to live in what is now Mitlan that was evicted or hounded off their lands.”
“How big is Mitlan anyway?” Rita asked.
“It stretches all the way to the ocean, these days,” Samual replied, gesturing to where the blue of the ocean was just barely visible under the thick, grey cloud cover in the distance. “They’ve been steadily growing for the past few hundred years as they annex and conquer their smaller, independent neighbours. Now, everything from Silkhaven to the wastelands pays at least lip service to the Mitlan Archpope.”
That was a terrifying thought. Rita had thought Mitlan was like, a city and a few villages, tops. Basically a duchy, or something. Instead, it sounded like she’d somehow pissed off Fantasy Spain. Inquisitors and all.
By this point, only the very tops of Grailmane’s stone spires were still visible.
Ahead of them, the carriage that she’d seen approaching from the other hill slowly made its way down into the same valley between the two hills that they were steadily descending towards. They were going to cross paths before too long.
“I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” Gora said, noticing the look of concern on Rita’s face. “The inquisitors know that they aren’t welcome in Grailmane. If one of them shows up there, flashing his power around, he’ll have an angry Magelord or two breathing down his neck in short order.”
“Yeah, they’re really not well liked over here. The Academy was originally built by a bunch of mages that were exiled from Mitlan,” Ava said. “Why do you think they called it the Academy of the Forbidden Arts?”
“An overly developed sense of the dramatic,” Samual remarked drily.
“Shut up! The Forbidden A is world renowned for its lack of ethical limitations!” Ava snapped as everyone burst out laughing. “It’s literally the only place of study in the world that allows study into Necromancy, Diabolism, Blood Magic and Contract Lore!”
“Contract Lore?” Rita asked, puzzled. “That doesn’t sound magical.”
“There is a magical framework underlying the whole thing, but yes. It’s mostly kind of a dry subject,” Ava admitted. “Not really my kind of thing.”
“It’s basically a study of contracts and wordings, heavy on the legalese, “Gora stated. “It started out as a way to deal with demons and devils, but nowadays it’s used quite often by businesses and rich folk for their own deals and agreements amongst each other, in order to keep all parties honest.”
“Wait, is that basically magical contract law?” Rita asked, aghast.
“That is a fairly accurate summation,” Zaxier mumbled sleepily from on top of her thorax.
How appropriate was it that the evil wizardry school taught necromancers, demon summoners and lawyers?
At this point, Rita could make out the driver of the approaching carriage. He was dressed in heavy robes to ward off the chill in the air. The carriage itself was enclosed, unlike their wagon, and was painted a simple dark grey colour.
Rita idly wondered who they were and where they were headed. The road they were on hadn’t seemed to head to many places apart from Triskellion.
“So they write contracts that people are compelled to follow?” Rita asked.
Gora and Ava both shook their heads. “No. It’s a common misconception. The magic just handles the paperwork. Duplication, preservation and so on,” Ava explained. “Enforcement is your own business. Or, should I rather say, the business of some knee-breaker that you pay to take care of it for you.”
“Except for demons. Full demons, not cambions like me,” Gora added. “Part of their conditions for entry into our world is that they have to submit to a contract and obey it. For them it’s binding on a deeper level, but that’s because their summoning ties into it. The contract itself doesn’t do shit.”
“You know an awful lot about this stuff,” Ava said, looking over at Gora. “For someone who just hits things for a living I mean.”
Gora shrugged. “Mom’s a diabolist. I picked up a few things here and there.”
“Oh wow, you’re a cambion and your mom’s a diabolist? That raises so many questions…” Ava grinned.
“Questions which will get you tossed off the wagon,” Gora said bluntly. “So keep them to yourself.”
Josoph, their driver, slowly guided their wagon to the side to let the oncoming carriage past.
“Your mother’s a diabolist?” Rita asked. “Could she help me to get in touch with a demon?”
Gora groaned. “I guess. She’s retired these days, but yeah, I suppose she might be able to point you in the right direction.”
“Thank you, Gora! I’ll owe you one!”
“Don’t think I won’t hold you to it for having to deal with my mother again...”
As the carriage approached them, a faint tingling sensation ran up Rita’s spine. It drew her attention to the glow of a small patch on the front of the carriage. Strange, she was sure it hadn’t been there a moment ago when she’d looked.
“Hey, guys, what’s that?” Rita asked, peering at the strange glowing squiggle.
It looked complex, with flowing, interlocking lines and intricately woven patterns. Even as Rita watched, the glow slowly spread across the entire surface of the carriage, seeming to reveal more and more of the symbols as it did. They were all connected into a single, glowing web.
It reminded her a little of the pattern that had floated in the air when Ava had done magic, way back near the Campfire.
“What’s going on? Hey! What are you guys doing?” Rita called out to the carriage, wondering why nobody else was reacting to it.
The carriage stopped, and a young man in a robe hopped out, stepping in front of their wagon. He held up his hands as if to flag them down.
She glanced back to the group. They were still just staring fixedly in front of themselves, flatly ignoring her and the approaching carriage.
“Guys, this isn’t funny, what’s going on?” she demanded.
There was no reaction. No, wait, that wasn’t right… Samual was peering at her from the corner of his eyes and the others’ were rolling their eyes around in their skull in an effort to look around. Rita could see faint trembling in their limbs as they strained to move.
They weren’t ignoring her. They were frozen.
High Inquisitor Patrus was delighted.
Every chance he had, he had flown back to that accursed tower of blighted stone. Every time he had followed the guidance of his Blessing of Retribution. Every time it had lead him back to the stronghold of those accursed Delvers.
And every time, as he circled their Bastion of Vile Heresy high up in the sky, readying himself to assault it and to burn all of the unbelievers with the fire of His Blessed Wrath, his Blessing of Omens had warned him that it was not yet time to strike.
Yet today it did not lead to that den of inequity. Instead, as he flew high in the sky from the Holy City of Mitla with blessed wings he felt his Blessing of Retribution pull him on a different course, closer towards the Festering Pit of Sin itself, Grailmane.
The spider had finally left her web.
And to think, before he had set off he had doubted whether this was the best use of his time, or whether he should have instead spent the day looking into those bandit raids on the far border. He should have trusted in Mitla’s great plan!
In his heart, he recited a quick prayer of forgiveness for his lack of faith, followed by a quick prayer of thanks for the piety to realize that he had lacked faith. Truly, Mitla’s gifts knew no bounds!
Now, at long last, she would pay for taking the life of his apprentice… who then received it back but only by the blessing of Mitla. Who would now be doomed to a life of being forever unable to touch the Blessings of Mitla, to carry His word and His power to the unbelievers of the world. Of being merely an ordinary, healthy young man, possibly with some bad dreams every once in a while.
It brought tears to his eyes just thinking about it.
He cut through the clouds, soaring on wings of truth and justice as he angled to follow the road leading to Grailmane, his hand closing on the hilt of his sword.
Today, that vile spider would finally face justice for that heinous act!