Emily, Impotuan fort in the Blue Mountains north of the Ahkeseld River
It was time to head to the basement to make our escape. Arma put two sheets into the laundry basket and then lifted me in. The sides of this thing were almost as tall as I was.
Arma frowned at me as I curled up in the bottom of the basket, “You really are tiny, even for a Coyn. How old are you? Are you fully grown yet?”
I sighed, “I haven’t gotten any taller for the last three years, so I think this is as big as I’m ever going to be. I assume that I’m fully grown. Yes, I know I’m small even for a Coyn.” I tried not grumble.
“Ouch, looks like I found a sore spot,” she raised an eyebrow at me. “So you think you are 15 or 16, in this life?”
“That’s about right.”
“It helps to know that you are much older than you look," she remarked and she put my clothes on top of me. Then she covered me with more laundry. "You are so confident and worldly when you speak while looking like a child – it’s off-putting and a bit frightening.”
“I think the gods might have done that on purpose, so I can use being underestimated as a weapon or ploy when dealing with adversaries,” I surmised.
"Well, it does deliver a bit of a shock," she admitted. The basket rocked when she picked it up. "Now, hush. We must pass three or four people on our way down to the basement." I did my best to adopt the mindset of a bedsheet, lying around with nothing to do all day besides attracting dust mites. I tried to keep my nerves from making me too jittery. It was hard letting someone else carry me to our departure point.
Arma started down steps and then leveled out. A man’s voice stopped her: “Doing laundry, my lady?”
“Linens don’t stop getting dirty just because there’s a battle on, Kelmain,” Arma replied with just a touch of weariness over doing chores.
The man laughed, “I guess that’s true.”
Arma continued walking and went down more stairs. From the sound of her footsteps, these were stone steps instead of wooden ones.
In a loud voice which I assumed was for the benefit of the other Cosm left in the fort, Arma called out: "Twee, wake up. I need some water in the washing basins." There was the sound of water rushing followed by the thump of bags or parcels being put on the floor. Then Arma lifted the laundry off me, which was a relief since the amount of cloth used on a Cosm bed was not an insignificant weight.
“Get dressed,” Arma whispered as she covered the top of the basket with a sheet. I was already in my pants and Ud-shirt. I pulled on my under and overtunics and belted them. On the premise that we would be in the water, I wrapped the billet end of my belt around the belted part several times so the end would not dangle. I did not know what had happened to my pouch, which wasn’t making me happy because the matches and the striking stone were in my pouch along with my little eating dagger, which was one of my only surviving possessions from my former home in the Vanishing River Valley.
The basket started shaking and it knocked me to my knees, which hurt. I was sure that would bruise. Then the basket kept shaking.
“Don’t panic, I’m casting a barrier,” Arma dragged the basket next to her. I could hear odd bits of things falling and could smell dust rising. It was an earthquake. It stopped soon enough that I guessed it would have been around a magnitude four if this had been Earth.
Arma flipped the sheet off the top of the basket, “you alright?”
"I'm fine. The further you get from the Great Cracks in Foskos, the more earthquakes there are in the Blue Mountains, or so I am told. That makes sense if you consider that the geothermal anomaly of the volcanic rift creates a seismic quiet zone because the increased heat, which decreases the..." I looked at Arma's completely befuddled face and stopped. "I'm sorry, Arma. You didn’t understand most of that, I’m guessing.”
“You understand why there are earthquakes?” She asked in a quiet voice full of doubt.
“Yes, I do,” I smiled apologetically.
"Ssssssssssthat's interesssssting," a sibilant tenor-to-alto pitched voice said behind me. "Sssssscan you explain it sssssometime for me when we are not attempting to take a sssssssudden trip?"
I turned to see two large but clouded eyes in what looked like a giant salamander head peeking out of what I had taken to be a cistern. The head was as wide as I was at my shoulders. His skin was dark brown with yellow spots.
“Yes, yes I can,” I replied, recovering from my moment of feeling startled by him.
The head turned back and forth and then pointed down toward me, “Ssssthere you are. You are just a little thing. Oh my, the gods really do favor you. Seven holy blessings and the eyes of the angry cat god.”
“What?” I was surprised. I thought Arma said he was blind. His eyes certainly looked like they had the tell-tale cloudiness of caustic lime burns.
"Twee was the shaman of his tribe of Chem," Arma said softly, seeing my confusion. "The Chem shaman can see auras. Now if you two can be quiet for a moment, I need to run upstairs for a moment. Emly, you should probably go around to the other side of Twee's sleeping tank so no one can see you if they look down the stairs. I moved and Arma ran up the stairs. We soon heard her voice.
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“Kelmain, are you alright? Is everyone accounted for? Was there any damage?” Arma accosted the man she talked to earlier.
“Crist scalded himself in the kitchen when a pot on the stove fell over," his voice sounded a bit distant. "That's all that happened. Everyone is otherwise fine and accounted for. I was more worried about the cook fires but there were no mishaps there."
“I will take care of cook Crist,” Arma said. We heard nothing for several moments and then footsteps came down the stairs.
“It’s me,” she whispered so I could hear her. She walked around the tank, “I’m the healer. It would have looked strange if I had not checked on everyone. But now that’s done. You, Emly, are probably looking for this,” she reached into her belt pouch and pulled out my missing belt pouch. “Is there anything in here that can’t get wet?”
"Oh, yes. Is there a way to keep things dry?" I pulled it open and checked to make sure the striking stone and copper box of matches were still there.
"Will this do?" she handed me two oilskin envelopes big enough to put all the contents of my pouch inside, along with greased leather thongs to tie them. I folded my pouch contents into an oilskin packet tied within an oilskin packet which I then stowed inside my pouch, now safely on my belt.
“Tie up your skirts like this," Arma instructed as she grabbed both sides of her tunics and tied the ends together, looping them through her belt. She looked like one of those working peasant women in the calendar pages of the Tres Riches Heures illuminated manuscript. All she needed was to tie her hair up in a white kerchief, and she could have stepped off the pages of a fifteenth-century hand-painted book. I followed her example. Tying my skirts up did get a lot of fabric away from my feet and lower legs.
Arma hefted what looked like a haversack onto her back. Then she picked me up without warning, which made me gasp in surprise.
"Sorry, I need to remember to warn you before I do that, don't I? You're very jumpy for a Coyn, you know." She stepped into the tank and I got my first look at all of Twee. He was about 12 hands from his nose to where his rear legs were and his tail started. Then there were about another 12 hands to the tail. The tail ended in four little tentacle-looking things. He had a bright red cloth like a bandana tied around his thick neck.
"Sssssit down in the water, Arma, and I will make the water run away from your heads."
“The water is warm, Emly, so it won’t be bad getting wet,” Arma said as she got both arms wrapped around me firmly and knelt.
“Sssssall the way under, sssssgirls,” Twee patted me on the head with his splayed fingers which did not appear to have a palm. His fingers looked like they splayed out directly from his wrist with a bit of webbing in between. I took a breath but found it unnecessary as a bubble of air about four hands in diameter formed around my head.
Twee wrapped himself around me and Arma just below my head. "Hhhhhhhere weeeee go," he said with his head immersed outside my air pocket. We started spinning in the water as if we were detritus could in a drain. That's probably close to what happened because in a moment we were in the dark, in what appeared to be a round water-filled passage. We traveled at a great speed, faster than I was comfortable with until we surfaced like a fishing float suddenly free from a fishing line.
“Sssssdo not get out yet,” Twee unwrapped himself and swam free. “Sssskeep your headsss down while I make trouble.”
The ground visibly trembled and moved in waves. Water spouts erupted around the valley the fort was in. It was built at the edge of where the forested slopes met a grassy basin surrounded by a ring of peaks. It was mostly shielded from sight by trees, obscuring it from being seen by flying mounts who were not directly on top of it.
“Sssssnow, ladiesss, run into the treesss,” Twee instructed. “They will be too busy saving themselves to look our way.” I hoped he was right. The ground disturbances continued and from behind a screen of majestic pines, we saw the stone foundation of the fort fail and the wood superstructure slide off into the liquified mud surrounding it.
"SssssssI made a new swamp here," Twee made a funny hissing noise that I thought might be his version of laughter. "Sssssswest to the river and the trade road isss thisss way. We ssshould walk as far as we can manage. It may be daysss before they discover that we are not in the ruins of the fort or it may be hoursss. Sssso away we should be."
“Hold on just a moment,” Arma said as she cast a drying charm. “There, how’s that, Emly?”
“Much improved, thank you,” I glanced back at the crumbling fort, whose beams and stones were still shifting and moving. I saw some men leap out of the collapsed wood upper story to the ground from where the fort was beginning to burn. “I hope the kitchen crew gets out okay.”
“Ssssssthey are the enemy,” Twee studied me, standing up on his hind legs. “Sssswhy should we care if they live or die?”
“They never did me any harm, Twee, and they are just cooks, not warriors,” I pointed out.
His head tilted to the side as he thought about what I said. "Sssssyou have a soft heart, little prophet, even after you have sssuffered ssso. Maybe it is a prophet thing. Arma, give me your belt end, and please lead us."
Arma carried me in her arms for hours, into the night. The ground under her feet vanished behind us. It was amazing how fast she could walk. Twee trotted alongside her on all fours, grasping the dangling end of her belt in his mouth. Every half bell or so, Arma would stop and give a waterskin to Twee who would squirt water into his gills. We noticed small tremors as we walked, but they were nothing to be alarmed over.
I confess that I fell asleep while Arma carried me. This left me feeling inadequate and embarrassed when I woke up, which was when she stopped traveling for the evening. We made a fireless camp in the trees, on a bluff overlooking the river. We could see the lights of the little traveler’s town called Three Rivers at the confluence of the Ahkeseld and Wall Rivers, which was about 500 hands shy of the confluence of the Adkeseld and Nocustoms Rivers.
It was toward the end of the growing season, which in the southern end of Foskos usually meant stream flows diminished because there was less rain. It would start snowing soon on the mountain tops but it would only sprinkle on the fields. Precipitation wouldn’t pick back up until the middle of the harvest season on the flat, and then only gradually.
The Ahkeseld was flowing slowly enough that I could see the stars reflected on the river's surface. The smear of stars overhead, which Foskans called Gertzpul's Road, was bright enough to see by at night. I had forgotten what moonlight looked like since Erdos had no moon.
I sat on the edge of the bluff and took in the beautiful view. I wanted my watercolor paints from my previous life, and my field box, stool, and a pad of Arches cold press to capture the scene. It was that lovely.
“Are you coming to sleep, Emly?” Arma asked. “I have a pillow for you.”
“Be there in a moment,” I answered. “I was just enjoying the scenery.”
I felt something thump on the ground. I was wrong that it was a thump. It was probably the P-wave of the earthquake whose presence became obvious a breath later when the ground wobbled under the S-wave. I started to get up to get away from the edge of the bluff.
“Emly!” Arma called out in concern. She started toward me. I never saw her arrive because the surface wave train of the earthquake arrived and the face of the bluff collapsed under me and into the river below, taking me with it. I could hear Arma shouting my name over and over until the ground fell on top of me and took me with it downward.