Chapitre Neuf: Régate
“...saying, not a single one of us knows how to send a magical message?”
“I’m a biochemist, me.”
“I know one spell.”
“...I know three… and they all have to do with fighting…”
“I do not know any spells. Ki is not magic. Wouldn’t this normally be the domain of a cleric?”
“No, listen, cantrips are different. I can pray to the Morninglord for different spells depending on what I need that day, but cantrips are either you know ‘em or you don’t!”
“So why don’t you?”
“I don’t know!”
They were hiking through the Savaliche Woods north of Vallac. The western or Evening Gate opened onto the road towards Kresiquer, though that road split and wandered northward towards the lake as well as southwards towards the Vistani camp shortly beyond the walls. The northern road was more like a disused path, choked with weeds and paved only with the remnants of ancient wheel ruts. At times, it was difficult to tell if they were even still on the road. The latest round of bickering had begun almost as soon as they had exited Vallac, as the group tried to figure out how they were going to locate and meet up with Sveta and their new pet tiger. “In the woods” was as much direction as she had given them. This was problematic, due to the fact that the Savaliche Woods spread to cover the vast majority of the valley floor, for dozens of miles in every direction. Not to mention that the conversation had occurred on the eastern side of the city, a little over a mile away. Given that their only current landmarks were the city of Vallac and Lake Varius, they were currently striking out towards the lake.
“Sorry I don’t know ‘ow to make a whisper go an ‘undred feet! I created artificial life, that’s all!”
“So why isn’t that artificial life flying around to find Sveta, huh?”
“...Aw, zut. Ivoire, wake up.”
The lighthearted debate was soured when they stumbled upon a body. It had once been a child of around ten years old; a boy, wrapped in a filthy rag of a nightshirt and nothing else. The corpse was not intact, either, having clearly been gnawed on by predators, birds, and finally bugs. It lay just off the road, beneath a bush.
“No wonder they hate wolves,” Oskar noted.
“...They didn’t even bury him…”
“Okay. You dig and pray to the moon, I’ll stand here and pray to the sun.”
Aeon obligingly did so, though the others looked at Valentina askance. By the time it was finished, Ivoire was diving out of the tree canopy with a squeak of brass hinges. It wasn’t long after that before Sveta was stepping out of the underbrush and onto the road. Her blue dress had a new tear up the skirt like a fashionable slit to the thigh. The first thing she said was, “Be careful. Was going into hunting crouch just now.”
Illyan groaned. Then thought better of making noises that implied vulnerability.
Sveta looked over her shoulder and clicked her tongue. “Syuda, Stripes. No pouncing.”
A low growl preceded the tiger. His great, armored shape slunk out of the bushes with his belly to the ground, his green eyes fixed on Illyan. He stopped obediently beside Sveta, though he remained in this hunting attitude with his tail flicking behind him. When standing, the beast’s shoulders were almost level with hers. Crouched, he was closer to the height of a normal, standing tiger–which was to say a little below waist-height. His protruding fangs were thicker at the base than Illyan’s fingers and longer than any of them.
“How goes the deprogramming?” Oskar asked.
Sveta shrugged philosophically. “Operant conditioning was not reversed in day.”
“You should ask ‘im if ‘e ever et a twenty-five-year-old Vistana named Esmé.”
“Spell has worn off by now. Could cast again but… I seriously doubt he knows names or ages of Vistani he has eaten. Is only big cat. Cat is… not smart.”
“This tiger is a walking microaggression against me,” Oskar rumbled.
Illyan patted his arm. “At least ‘e’s not trying to eat you. But, d’ac, I take your point, Mémé.”
Agreeing that it was unlikely they would find any destined werewolf allies on the road to the lake, the group struck out through the woods at large. They walked in no particular direction, taking a meandering route. Stripes padded quietly along at the back of the group. Illyan felt his gaze on the back of their neck like a constant draft, causing his fiery hair to prickle. Every time they stumbled on a root or got their clothes snagged on a branch, they expected it to be the end of them. The tiger would sense weakness and pounce and that would be it. Every time it didn’t happen felt less like a reprieve and more like a stay of execution. Whose idea had stealing this tiger been again?
Some time later, they still had not run into any wolves, were or otherwise, but they had begun to make out the muffled sounds of human voices shouting. Whoever was shouting was stomping through the bushes, beating them on purpose to make as much noise as possible. They were approaching from the south. The closer they got, the more obvious the Vistana twang to their accents became.
“Arty! Arty, Papa’s lookin’ for you! C’mon out, now!”
“Follow our voices, loulou!”
“Arthémise! Arty! ‘Ey, it’s Tante Salomé! Arthémise!”
“Oh no,” Sveta said, flatly, looking at Stripes. The tiger had frozen mid-stalk, even his tail no longer swishing, muscles bunched up beneath his fur.
“Someone go ahead and warn them!” Oskar barked, sinking into his own ready-to-pounce stance. Aeon stepped up beside him, arms out and ready to wrestle once more. Illyan, unwilling to expose himself to more Vistana after the debacle of his exile, shoved Jinghua hard in the small of the back. She rolled with the movement, obligingly trotting towards the voices.
When she emerged from around a certain elm’s trunk, she found the Vistani. There were three of them, two men and a woman, dressed in the typically extravagant style of their culture. The leading woman, who must have been Salomé, appeared to be some manner of half-human, though Jinghua was unable to identify what the other half might be. Her olive skin was a bit more on the green side than that phrase usually implied, and one of her eyes was a strange shade of gas-flame blue while the other was a more typical brown. The noises they had been making were apparently sheathed swords which they were using to loudly beat the bushes as they passed. The group briefly tensed at the sight of the strange harengon before relaxing.
“‘Ey, mec, you been out ‘ere long?” Salomé called out.
Jinghua said, “Some time. Are you looking for someone?”
“Ouais. Our elder’s daughter’s gone missing. ‘Alf of Clan Fontenot is combin’ the forest for ‘er. You seen a li’l Vistana girl, answers to Marcel Arthémise?”
“...I regret to say, I found a dead child earlier on the road, but I believe him to have been Barovian as well as male. How old is Arthémise?”
“Six.”
“He was a bit older than that, as well.”
The group breathed a collective sigh of relief. “Grâce à Dieu. Well, if you see ‘er, elder Agobard Loïc of Clan Fontenot would give you an ‘andsome reward for ‘er safe return. She’s ‘uman, brown ‘air, no bigger than a pea.”
“I will keep an eye out for her,” Jinghua promised. “But for now, it may be best if your search party returned to your camp. These woods are full of dangers.”
The Vistani shared derisive looks and scoffs. “Merci, mec, but I think we can ‘andle it. Anyway, that’s why we gotta find her soon-soon. You just look out for yourself and Tit-Arty.”
Valentina let loose a sudden, piercing scream from behind Jinghua. She crashed out of the bushes beside her and hollered, “A tiger! A loose tiger in the woods! Oh, no, everybody run! It’s going to eat us all!”
“Que diable?!” Far from running, Salomé unsheathed her sword and darted forward. Her two companions followed suit one step behind.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Don’t! It’s huge! It’s hungry! It’s gonna–well, I tried.” Valentina drooped.
Jinghua closed her eyes. “We have been party to many evil deeds this day.”
“This one is not on us. We did not train the tiger to eat Vistani.”
“We did release it into the woods where the Vistani live.”
“And I tried to warn them, but they ran straight towards the tiger instead!”
It only took a few seconds to backtrack to where they had left the others, including the man-eating tiger. In the time it took for those seconds to elapse, the fight was almost over. Aeon and Oskar struggled together to hold the tiger back from the last Vistana standing, while the other two lay bleeding into the loam, one with his belly opened and Salomé with her throat bitten out.
Sveta stood to one side, scowling slightly. “Bad kotyonok! Bad! No killing people!”
Stripes let rip a guttural snarl in response. The last Vistana standing, shaking in every limb, lunged forward to strike him with his sword, only for the blade to skid off of the tiger’s bespoke armor. Stripes quickly proved that he had only been letting Aeon and Oskar hold him down earlier by bulling straight out their arms. With a scream and a crunch, it was over.
Illyan pulled a face of disgust as Stripes began to chow down. “Should we… let ‘im do that?”
“They’re already dead,” Valentina sighed. “We can’t even take their money or it’ll be obvious a person was involved and not just a wild animal.”
“Still don’t seem right.”
“Please ask him to stop,” Jinghua put in.
Sveta snapped her fingers. “Stripes, nyet.”
With a last lick of the pooling blood, the tiger reluctantly stepped away from his kills.
“I am not looking forward to how today manifests in my future dharma,” Jinghua commented, as they resumed their northward meander.
“Tracasse-toi pas, ami. You’ll be a cricket by then. Won’t even notice.”
----------------------------------------
Lake Varius spread before them like a small sea as much as a large lake. It was theoretically possible to see the opposite shore from where they stood, but only on that rarest of Barovian occasion: a clear day. Today’s on-and-off rain meant that the sky was an unbroken pane of iron gray and the clouds seemed to form a continuous wall all the way down from it to the surface of the black water. If not for that, they’d have been able to see the northern mountain ridge rising up above the treeline as well. The lakeshore truly resembled a miniature beach, with a slope of sandy, dark earth that the water lapped at gently. Nothing like so powerful as the pounding of ocean surf, but still a regular beat. There was a rickety pier which ran into the mist and out of sight. Two rowboats bobbed in the water beside it, making gentle, hollow knocking sounds that filled the ringing silence of the water. Everything here sounded muffled and distant, despite the space having opened up.
Valentina pursed her pink lips. “No wolves here, I guess. Unless they’re water-wolves.”
Unexpectedly, she was shushed by Jinghua and Oskar simultaneously. Oskar’s ears were pricked forward, towards the mist over the lake. Jinghua’s own ears were tied together and back, but had lifted as much as they were able to do the same. In step, they advanced onto the pier, clearly chasing a clearer picture of something that they had both heard. The others followed, walking as quietly on the creaking planks as they could.
A dark shape became visible through the mist, a hundred yards or more out from the end of the pier. A third boat, with someone in it. The boat was rocking violently back and forth, water slopping and sloshing all over. The man within the boat seemed to be holding something which was struggling. A fish? It was huge, though. The man seemed to be forced to lift it with both arms in a bear hug.
Several things happened at once.
The struggling mass let out a thin, human wail.
The man heaved it over the side of the boat, where it hit the water with a gargantuan splash.
Oskar snarled and lunged for one of the boats. “It’s a child!”
Jinghua bolted for the other.
“Healer in each!” Valentina yelped, scrambling to get into Jinghua’s boat. Illyan piled into the other. Aeon unsheathed his sword and chopped the tethers with one swipe each. He, Sveta, and Stripes lingered on the pier, unwilling to leave the tiger unsupervised. They could only watch as Oskar and Jinghua each took up a set of oars and bent to.
Heart in her throat, Valentina was counting. The average human could hold their breath for maybe two minutes at most. That was if they had air in their lungs when they went in, however. Whoever that was had been screaming, air lost, mouth fully open. Oskar had said they were a child, too. That meant they more likely had one minute, max. Or maybe even less.
If they were on foot, she was sure they could cross a hundred yards in a matter of seconds. Or, if not herself, necessarily, then Oskar and Jinghua. She’d seen the man practically blur out of rooms and watched the woman leap from a standing position onto roofs. There was no way it would take them a full minute to make a hundred yards.
In a boat, though…
“Kid ain’t come back up,” Illyan reported, from his prow. He was shouting over the splash and grunts of their rowers. The messiness of their strokes meant that their boats were a fair distance apart, in order to avoid collisions and also as a result of their somewhat squiggly forward progress. There was no way they’d be sneaking up on whoever had just dumped a child into the lake. They could only hope he didn’t cut his losses and kill the kid using a faster method before they got there. He’d almost certainly flee, though.
Valentina fumbled out a pinch of moss, tracing it over the emblem on her shield. “Sole Lord am I of all this realm of sight!” Her light spell beamed out like a rose-tinted fog light, cutting through the mist ahead of them. They could see the froth of bubbles where the child must have sunk, and the rowboat containing the culprit. He was just… sitting there. Making no move to get away or even look at the hastily-approaching rescue team. He was simply staring at those bubbles as if hypnotized.
Oskar heaved. Jinghua groaned. Seconds ticked by–six, twelve, eighteen, twenty-four…
Jinghua’s boat had pulled ahead. Oskar let loose a thunderous growl. A cramp or a torn something flashed across his left elbow like a lightning strike. His mouth hung open, heaving for breath. “I can’t…”
“Move!” Illyan seized the oars. He bent his whole body with each stroke, dented ribs heaving like bellows. Thirty seconds, thirty-six, forty-two…
Jinghua was a machine. Her upper body was bent forwards, her arms churning powerfully. Her triceps stood out like bulging fruit beneath her skin on every stroke.
The muscles of her back pumped up and down like ocean waves. Her eyes were completely closed, her mind as still as her body wasn’t. She was picturing a tree, its branches swaying in the wind. She was a tree, moving beneath the wind of necessity. A tree did not get tired. It had no choice but to move until the wind stopped. She was equally powerless to stop her own movement. The movement no longer belonged to the body doing it, but to the mind producing it. Her mind.
When she had lost control over her meditation those four days ago, she had awoken back in Fanyu. This time, it had been in a shrine by the side of the road, rather than in a hotel room. She certainly didn’t have the money to rent a room for days on end, especially when she had no idea how long she would be dreaming of Barovy aside from “as long as she could”. She ran the risk of being charged or even imprisoned if she tried to sit and meditate in a hotel room without paying for a week. Instead, she had sought out a little wooden shrine to a local god of the earth, left an offering of fruit, and then put down a mat inside. At least here she would be sheltered from the rain, and hopefully nobody would bother a monk meditating in a shrine. Even if they tried to rob her, they were welcome to the single copper she had to her name. It wouldn’t set her back much. From there, she had settled into a meditation which took her not back into the mists of Barovy, but to the cloudy peak of the monastery where she had been trained.
Forty-eight seconds. Fifty-four.
Sixty.
Sixty-six.
Valentina’s breath left her as they passed the minute mark. The child… That poor child…
Throwing her oars aside, Jinghua dove into the water. Her arms didn’t burn. Her lungs didn’t cramp. Her eyes didn’t sting. She was a being of pure will. She would not allow this astral body to trick her into suffering. Below her, sinking rapidly, was a lump of burlap. A sack, tied at one end. She seized the trailing tie, pulled down after the heavy sack until she was able to flip around and kick out with her long legs. Kick, kick, kick. She propelled herself and the unfortunate, bound child to the surface.
Her astral body had, three days ago, climbed those endless stairs to the Abbot’s peak just like this. An endless, repetitive kicking motion which she had imagined countless times as a leveret but never truly experienced. Junior disciples weren’t invited to the master’s residence, after all. Arguably, she had still not truly experienced it, but it felt as though she had. When she had reached the grand pavilion at the top, she had paced boldly inside and greeted the Abbot seated within with a bow.
“I have walked among the people of a valley not of this plane,” she had greeted him.
Surfacing from the lake, she couldn’t help but gasp for air. The need was fundamental. No amount of willpower could stop the reflex. This astral body of hers was possessed of all its senses; the feeling of being surrounded by cold water pressing in on all sides, of it in her nose and in her ears and in her eyes, was impossible to force her body to totally ignore, even knowing that it made no sense for it to need to breathe.
The Abbot had explained this use of ki and meditation to her. It was a form of meditation called astral projecting, where her divine sense parted from her earthly body and went traveling the world as a simulacrum of her flesh. In a way, everything she went through in Barovy was a trick. The sensations of the astral body convinced her mind that her body was undergoing certain experiences like pain or danger. That mental conviction produced an effect in her true body, so far away in Fanyu. The corresponding adrenaline, dopamine, or melatonin would flood her brain. Her muscles would contract or produce lactic acid, even in tiny amounts. Almost certainly her breathing would change without her knowledge or control. Though she wouldn’t wake up with wounds she sustained in this valley, she’d wake up as tired and miserable as if she’d been wounded. The centipede-bite scars which were visible to her could not be seen on her true body by any but herself; her mind was simply convinced that they were there.
Though her true body wasn’t drowning, it was nigh impossible to tell if the sensations of water on her projection’s face had caused it to hold its breath. Jinghua had no doubt that if she were to drown in Barovy, her true body would simply cease to inhale until it followed her mind into death. She wasn’t master enough of this skill to balance the sensations of both perfectly. Even if it did not, the death of her divine sense would be the death of her mind–her memories, thoughts, and personality. If her body continued to breathe, that was all it would do until death took her. It would be an empty husk.
She knew already that the pain in her muscles was going to be agonizing, even if it was only a fraction of what her astral body was feeling. Jinghua gratefully heaved the burlap sack up into the waiting hands of Valentina, who was chanting even as she fell backwards into the rowboat with the child in her arms. “Mine to receive and happily mine to give!”
The sack came alive with sputtering, hacking coughs. Illyan sprang from his boat into Valentina’s, while Oskar threw himself into the one belonging to the still-motionless man. He swiped one claw across the man’s chest. Reactionless as a wooden doll, the man collapsed to the bottom of his rowboat. Oskar stood above him, unsure, while Valentina frantically peeled the sack away from the child within. A tiny Vistana girl in a scarlet dress fell out, still coughing up water and gasping for air. Her fluffy mane of brown hair was slicked flat all over her face and back. She’d clearly been fighting like a tiger in that sack. She didn’t notice the application of one of Illyan’s leeches to her neck as she snorted lakewater out of her nose.
“Are you Arthémise?” he asked, urgently. “Marcel Arthémise of Clan Fontenot?”
“That’s me,” the girl choked. “Who’re you? Where’s Boleslas?”
“Coleslaw?” Valentina blinked. “Are you confused? Can you follow my finger?”
“Boleslas! The connard who kidnapped me!” Marcel Arthémise snarled. “My Papa’s gonna peel ‘is skin off!”
“He’s out,” Oskar called over. “Is there something wrong with him? He wasn’t moving or talking.”
She sat up. Both hands were required to wrestle the tangling strands of her hair away from her face and throat. “‘E’s just stupid! Sans-âme!”
“‘Ey,” Illyan said, weakly. It was a pejorative usually used by Vistani against Barovians. Vistani culture encouraged births to occur outside of the valley and deaths to occur within, in order to ensure that all Vistana were born with souls, unlike the unfortunate, trapped Barovians. Even so, it wasn’t accurate to say that no Vistana had ever been born soulless. It was just less common by a wide margin.
Then again, the girl had almost drowned about ten seconds ago. She had earned some swears. Which she seemed to be using fairly liberally, at that. Who had taught this girl such foul language?
“Why did he do this?” the tabaxi demanded, looking down at his easily-defeated foe. For someone so used to struggling against monsters and zombies, it was a little disturbing to have so easily dispatched what, to all appearances, was a civilian man. He did indeed dress like a Barovian, in filthy, peasant’s clothes which had clearly not seen washing-water in months. If ever. His hair might once have been fair, but it was as filthy as his outfit. His eyes were sunken above round, fleshy cheeks and on either side of a beaked nose, both of which were webbed with the broken blood vessels of a chronic alcoholic. There was no expression on that dying face. No fear or pain in his final moments. He lolled with the movement of the boat like a discarded toy.
“‘E said, ‘Vistana is lucky’,” Marcel Arthémise mocked, pitching her voice down deep and flat.
“What does that have to do with putting you in a sack and drowning you?”
“‘E said, ‘No more fish are biting. Lucky Vistana will bring fish.’”
“Son of a bitch.” Valentina sneered. “Tip him in. Let the fish eat him.”
Oskar obeyed.
The row back to shore was more subdued. Valentina and Illyan took over for their respectively exhausted and injured partners. Marcel Arthémise began to chatter as she calmed, complaining of the cold and of the taste of the lakewater. With no more adrenaline or deadlines, the trip took a fair sight longer than sixty-six seconds.