When my bloodlust ended, I felt strangely enervated and fell asleep on the ground, still bloody and surrounded by gore. I slept in daylight and woke up in daylight but I somehow knew that I’d slept quite a long time.
“You’re finally awake, you great oaf,” came the now expected caustic voice of my ghostly companion.
I woke up simultaneously rested and still sleepy, it was an irritating feeling.
“I see that you’re still here. I avenged you so I had ho…expected that you would go on to the next life or whatever,” I told Ghost Kishni drily.
“Hmmm….”
The Pridish gore that covered me head-to-toe had dried and caked all over my body and clothes. Now that I was no longer running for my life I could risk heading over to the river to take a bath but I believed my clothes to be soiled beyond saving.
Newly come into my power though I was, casual nudity was something I was not prepared to indulge in. I also didn’t have any skill to create clothes out of leaves. So, the only option I was left with was to see if I could find anything useful in the upturned velocicar.
Getting into the thing was easy, the fleeing Prids had left the back hatch extended open behind them. The problem was the size of the thing. The velocicar was roughly a cuboidal shape, a square cross-section elongated in direction. The square’s length was shorter than my height by more than a few feet. But there were further complications. For one thing, the height of the contraption was such that I couldn’t walk through it by simply hunching, I would have to either crab walk or crawl. I don’t crab walk.
Moreover, my unimpressive yet lucky boulder throw had turned the velocicar turtle and the insides were a mess. I could see numerous, shiny and sharp obstacles and I dreaded scraping parts of my body against those. But even stading away from the hatch I had spied all sorts of potential useful items – some fabrics, bushels of grain and some glowing orbs which I was itching to examine.
Steeling myself I got on all fours and started crawling gingerly into the velocicar. I found suitable fabrics almost immediately. The walls closest to the hatch had been lined with cages full of food, animals and other items that the Prids obviously considered useful. These cages had been designed to keep their contents intact but the hinges holding them to the walls had clearly not been designed with the expectation that the entire vehicle would roll. So, numerous cages lay strewn across my path, and next to them some heavy, well-sowed fabrics that had possibly been draped over the cages.
I felt the fabrics and was immediately entranced. Although the ‘cloth’ flowed like cloth, it was tougher than any material I had encountered at the village. I tried scraping against the fabric with my nails and nothing. Kesi cotton would have ripped immediately. I almost started singing.
“Hmmm… and who’s going to sew these things into pants for you?” asked the old woman haunting me.
I shot her a knowing grin, “Who said anything about sewing?”
She cocked one eyebrow at that.
“These Prids may be masters of magic and technology, but the Kesi know how to tie a vesthi without any stitches needed.” I winked. She huffed.
I gathered the longest pieces of the tough fabric and began to drag them out of the vehicle. I would lay all my findings in one spot so that I could sort through them later at my leisure.
When I scraped my knee against some sharp metal, drawing blood I yelped, dropped the fabric and clutched the hurt knee.
“Ssssssssssss…….ssssssssss…….sssssssssss”
I was a lot more careful during my next foray into the velocicar. This time, my target was the bushels of grain I had seen lying around earlier. The cages containing the grain had been thrown about and the bales looked ruffled but they had been bound by thick twine (which I also bagged) and were largely unmolested. As I dropped the bales of grain and stalk next to my future clothing, I realised that these foodstuffs had probably been collected by the Pridish contingent from my village and the other Kesi villages that they had visited earlier. It made me sad and hesitant – I knew from the violence that I had escaped, what this tithe meant for the villagers’ lives, it was blood food.
“Don’t regress,” came the stern but not unkind voice of Ghost Kishni.
“I’m not. I have to eat, I know that. But I also know where this food came from.”
Her ‘Hmmm’ in reply sounded to disapproving to my ears.
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As the day wore on and I ventured deeper into the vehicle, I encountered slightly more troubling sights. The Prids had clearly also taken some livestock as tithe. These animals, koats and fowl mainly, had been stuck together in similar, small cages. Unlike the grain however, the poor souls had not survived the rolling of the velocicar. Ripping the head off the Pridish Governor hadn’t made me feel anything but seeing the devastation wrought on the small furry and feathery bodies made me gag. Also the smell was unbearable.
As I was backing out of the vehicle, my heel hit something solid and I cursed as I turned to look at what it was. One the ground, lay the back end of a metal cylinder which rose and extended out of a circular hole in the wall. The part of the cylinder near the ground, which my feet had hit, was glowing with a throbbing red light.
As I examined the cylinder curiously, I felt the hairs on my hand rise as I brought them close to the red light. I noticed that there was a sort-of-handle built into the side of the cylinder and a shaft with a protrusion emerged out of the cylinder near the handle.
I cautiously touched the object. It was slightly warm to the touch but nothing untoward happened. Feeling a bit more confident I examined the handle and the shaft. The protrusion seemed to be a separate piece and I poked it gently with a finger. The protrusion sunk into the shaft slightly. I poked harder, it got further depressed. I pushed it all the way to the bottom…
‘BOOM!’
There was a flash of red light and heat, the cylinder jerked backwards and I fell onto my backside in shock stupidly screaming “Stars!”
The sound seemed to reverberate around the vehicle and inside my head. My brain felt like a bell that was being rung heavily. The cylinder which had glowed with a dull red now had strobing red lights moving longitudinally along its length.
I observed the cylinder from a distance as the vehicle and my head settled. The strobing lights gradually calmed down and the cylinder returned to its original dull red. Having gotten over my initial shock, I was curious to see what exactly had happened. I had a strong suspicion that I knew what the cylinder was and what it did, but I wanted to be sure before doing anything further.
I stepped around the cylinder and without touching it peeked around its edges through the porthole it was exiting out of. Lo and behold, about a hundred metres away, there was a newly blackened and smoking crater in the already-violated ground. This cylinder was what they had tormented me with and it was one hell of a powerful weapon. I wanted it. I wanted to use it on them.
I carefully avoided touching what I now knew was the trigger mechanism and tried to dislodge the cylinder. Yanking it from its bracket and hinge was easy enough, but pulling it out of the porthole was another matter. The cylinder had a ridge on the part extending outside the porthole ostensibly to prevent it from slipping inside the vehicle and the end of the cylinder inside the vehicle was of a larger diameter probably to prevent an enemy from just stealing it by dragging it out. I puzzled over it for all of a minute before reverting to brute strength. I would pull the entire thing into the vehicle.
As I strained and the cylinder strained against the porthole’s edge, I heard a mocking voice, “Or you could have spent maybe another few minutes figuring the puzzle out. But you’re an important man, have places to be.”
“Shush…can’t you see I’m busy!” I retorted through gritted teeth.
Eventually I won. The edge of the porthole bent inwards, more and more and finally seemed to peel as I fell backwards, dragging the cylinder with me.
“Yay…” I said feebly to no one.
----------------------------------------
As dusk fell, I was outside the vehicle with a treasure trove by my feet. I had washed in the river and then returned to organize my haul.
I had in front of me two large pieces of the tough fabric, two medium pieces and many small, irregular pieces. I had about ten bushels of grain as well. Most importantly, I had a Pridish cannon laid out along with a half-a-dozen fist-sized glowing rubies which I suspected were the magical item that powered the cannon. I had tried the cannon again outside the confines of the velocicar and it worked perfectly albeit dropping me on my backside again. The cannon’s shape and the fact that it wasn’t built to be carried and used made it difficult to hold. Also the kick the cannon gave was strong and unexpected. I would need to figure out a better way to use it…but I had time now.
I had already fashioned a vest out of one of the medium fabrics and was fashioning a vesthi, a lower-body drape with one of the long fabrics when my ethereal companion spoke up.
“Showing your bits to an old woman. Aren’t you embarrassed?”
“You’re either a ghost or a figment of my madness. If I get embarrassed in front of you, I might as well just end things.”
I wrapped up all the other small items and knickknacks with the remaining long fabric and made a makeshift pouch out of it. I looked at the pouch and the cannon laying next to it and sighed contentedly.
“Well that’s it! All set!”
“Hmmm…” said the ghost following me, “What about the monstrosity? You’re going to leave it as it is?”
I turned to look at the velocicar and pondered Ghost Kishni’s observation. A part of me wanted to leave it as it was, in case I wanted to return and plunder it again. But I suspected that the Prids would be after me now and they would be the ones to find it not any Kesi. In fact, the Kesi would probably leave a Pridish machine alone if they found it. I didn’t like the idea of leaving the Prids to recover their machine or their cannons. Sometime over the past day I had internalised my expectation of a war with the Prids and I was going to make them pay.
I lugged the cannon into my arms, took a steadying stance, pointed the cylinder at the opening of the velocicar, took a deep breath and pressed the trigger. I was rocked backwards this time, but stayed on my feet. The sound and the fury didn’t bother me. When the smoke cleared, the velocicar was a mess of crumpled, burned and torn metal looking a lot like its former operators.
I waited for the cannon to cool, then settled it over my shoulder and draped the pouch over my other shoulder. I headed upwards into the mountains, drawing the gnomes in.