Xangô POV: Day 46

Current Wealth: 1 silver 47 copper

If I’d known the old man expected us to pay for our own meals on the road, I might’ve actually thought twice before following him. Not just out of basic thrift, but out of the simple fact that his not having the food already on him was a dangerous sign that he’d been lying about what his village could afford to pay.

Well, maybe not. My motives for helping had been a lot more tied to compassion than I’d made out to Solitaire. He probably knew as much, but still it was important to keep up pretences in polite conversation. So much of adult dialogue was built on convenient lies, after all.

At the very least our new employer had been able to afford a wagon, and we sat in it for the duration of the journey, wrapping ourselves in the blankets we’d bought to make the trip between Jhigral and Wolney, staving off the icy elements with conversation. And glaring, jealously, at the far thicker layers wrapped around the elder as he drove the vehicle on.

It would be about four days before we arrived, double the length we’d spent travelling last time, and yet somehow not feeling like anything much at all. We were adjusting, it seemed, to the slow, tedious way this world had of doing anything. And I wasn’t entirely sure if I liked the fact.

Our journey was kept busy, though, despite the volume of sitting and shivering we spent it on. We were, after all, riding our way to a combat zone, and not one of us was stupid enough to do so blind. So we spoke, asking the old man every question that flitted into our minds, and preparing one another for every eventuality we could think of. Thanks to Solitaire, that latter list was near inexhaustible.

Rotters were one thing, we were confident enough of holding out against them even at night, provided we had a suitably defensive position. It was quite another, though, to face the other creatures that might be among them. I wasn’t sure whether we’d be dealing with dark knights, putrefaction golems or skeletal dinosaurs, but there’d very possibly be some heavier hitters there with hundreds of zombies present.

Oh, you don’t know any of those terms? Haven’t read our book? Well, putting aside that slight against me, they’re bad, awful and fucking atrocious to fight respectively. And the old man was more than likely lying about there not being any higher undead at all. He didn’t want to scare us off.

Smart.

“If one of the big ones attacks, we should use trenches.” Solitaire suggested, confidently. “Square-cube law and all that.”

“What the bloody hell is that?” Argar asked, frowning in confusion, looking at him as if he were half mad.

I knew what the term meant, even though everything I’d ever learned about engineering had been against my will as part of the world-building process, and I understood what Solitaire was getting at. Elephants died to a fall easier than mice, after all. I explained as much to Argar, then paused as a new thought struck me.

“What if it’s one of the…Uh, magical ones?” I asked, mind flitting to dark thoughts of liches vampires and everything in between. Solitaire smiled, chirpily.

“It’ll kill the shit out of us, and there’s nothing short of a browning machine gun we could use to do anything about it.”

Ah. Well, he was honest at least, the fucker. I nodded, and tried to bury my concerns.

Truth be told, for all our strategizing, there wasn’t actually that much variation to any of the plans. The overwhelming majority of them would be dealing with more or less the same variables, and we’d already done enough work writing about rotters to have figured out the ideal way of combating them. It was something Argar very much seemed to approve of, despite his reservations about the whole ordeal.

Well, they were zombies. Pop culture had done most of the heavy lifting years before we even wrote a thing. Dumb, shambling morons with no more innate durability than humans. Set up traps, barricades, buy some time and you can kill them almost at your leisure. But they were fast zombies, at least by night, and numbers could overwhelm.

This wasn’t going to be easy no matter what.

Stolen novel; please report.

Days drifted by in a lazy, chilly haze, and we took to sleeping while the sun was up. By nightfall, as far as we were into the woods, we knew the rotters would be active and plentiful, swarming the carriage and burying us in rotting flesh. The only way to avoid that was to save the horses' stamina and strength to expend on outrunning them.

Even so there were more than a few close calls, where the creatures got nearer than we’d have banked on. Fortunately we were all diligent, and the night vision provided by lifetimes of nourishing, vitamin-rich diets in the modern world let us spot the creatures well before they were on our escort.

Frankly, it was a miracle he’d made it to Wolney without us. A suspiciously big miracle, even, which he didn’t explain no matter how much we asked. Which brought on a whole new problem, because the lack of explanation almost had Solitaire leaning forwards to cut the man’s throat from behind, and left me and Beam stuck focusing on talking him out of it about five times per day.

Now, as I said we’d been getting used to the long, winding journeys that came hand in hand with this world. And that was true. But it wasn’t all that was gnawing at us during this trip. Before, we’d been going to Wolney. A place with work, with food, with inns. A place, if anything, that would be better than the dogshit little town we were leaving.

Now? Now we were leaving Wolney, and rattling towards a death trap. Which has a fairly unique effect on a man’s state of mind, let me tell you. If I had to describe it, I’d do so with the analogy of a spring. Imagine one getting slowly compressed, forced tighter by the second, coiling inwards and building up energy until, just as it reaches its absolute limit, a fucking atomic bomb falls right on top of you.

In this scenario, the spring is our journey, we’re the idiots squeezing it, and the bomb was what we were jittering and spasming in fear of, building up as an inevitable future in our minds and trembling over. Well, I say “we”, it was actually only the normal people. Which is to say, me, Argar and the old man.

Solitaire’s default state of mind, apparently, is “the entire human race wants to kill me”, so this was nothing new for him. If anything, knowing for a fact that he was riding to trouble seemed to actually comfort the lunatic. And as for Beam…Well, nothing ever could shake him.

Plenty could shake me, though. Including my own muscles, because by the time we were on our last day I was shivering with an adrenal overflow so much that I actually heard my teeth chattering. Beam and Solitaire picked right up on it of course, and I was braced for the mockery long before it came. Largely because it never did.

“Deep breaths.” Solitaire told me. “Just focus on the feeling of air moving in and out of you, force it to happen slowly. Remember you're in control of those lungs, they work as fast as you tell them, and no faster. If they’re too quick for your liking, seize them and drag them down to a better pace.”

I tried his advice, and it actually worked. Gave me something to think about, for one thing, and the fact that it was something I had power over…Somehow that was more soothing than the distraction itself.

He wasn’t done with his advice.

“This will pass.” He pressed. “You’ll feel better, calmer, in the future. For now, you’re still here, and you have an age to think about what you’ll do next. So use it. What’s the plan?”

I gathered my wits, and tried to come up with something. It was Beam, cutting in next, who helped me along.

“What if there is a strong undead there.” He suggested. “How do we deal with that?”

“It’s the worst case scenario.” Solitaire continued, catching his train of thought and chasing it. “So imagine that’s already happened, that it’s the only case. This is as bad as it can get…So if we knew it’s what was awaiting us, what would we do?”

By the time there was a village within our sight again, just barely visible over the dawn-reddened horizon, they’d managed to calm me down enough that my blind panic was starting to give way for…Embarrassment.

It wasn’t like me to lose my shit like that, I was meant to be the calm one. The cool one. I smiled at my friends, and thanked them for everything, but somehow their help had just left me more hollow.

Finally starting to slow as we neared the village’s outer ring was a welcome distraction, and I was practically counting the wheel turns as I waited for our cart to finish its deceleration so we could crawl out from under the blankets and leap down.

Well, not exactly crawl out from under the blankets. We kept those on as we placed boots back down on snow and came round the vehicle’s side. It was just hard to give them up, after getting so used to the luxury. Whatever effect it had on our cool factor, however, the townsfolk didn’t seem to notice. They were too busy staring with a mix of awe, apprehension and, if my eyes didn’t deceive me, actual happiness.

The old man rushed ahead to them, more eager now than any of us had seen him since he first found out we’d be helping. Apparently his failure had been anticipated, even by himself.

It was odd, seeing the few dozen citizens as they swarmed the area just around us. They all looked thin, frail and undernourished as most of the homeless people we’d seen in this world, and yet most of them had grins on their faces and light in their eyes. Hope, I realised. Hope because of us.

In that moment, any regrets I still had about riding over to save this town evaporated, and I felt a bizarre new resolve creeping in to cast my spine in steel. I tightened my jaw, straightened my back, and took a few steps forwards.

Speaking to address the people we were going to save.